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Manipulating Chain of Java Extensions for the upgrade/installation process

17 June 2019 / / 2 Comments

 

I recently had to upgrade a pretty complex system. The original environment includes Maximo and ICD, and two large customization packages, one extended by the other (let’s call them package XXX extended by package YYY). The target system is the latest Maximo + ICD 7.6.1, plus 4 add-ons which include Oil & Gas and Utilities.

Customization was written by 3 different third parties over a long period of time and the source code was lost. This posed some challenges related to preserving customization and I had to spend a bit of time to figure it out. Below are some of the gotchas I learnt after the project:
 
Problem 1: Ensure customization is preserved after the upgrade

After reviewing the SMP folder, I found about 300 extended Java class files, but the product.xml files only cover about 20-30% of them; worse, some data are not even up-to-date. After the initial attempt to correct these files, I decided to simply ignore them, and build new product.xml files from scratch. Below are some of the key steps I had to do:
 
  • List out all extended java class files found in the SMP folder (using the command: dir /s /b  >list.txt) and put them in an Excel sheet
  • Use SQL to search from the DB any usage of custom Java code, put this list into another Excel sheet
  • Match the two sheets above to identify any missing files
  • Use a decompiler to view the code of each file to determine what is the original class it extends, and the type of the class (which I put into: Action, Bean, Cron, Event, Field, Object, Util)
  • For each of the class types, use Excel to generate an XML element as the follow examples:
  • After generating those elements, I put them together into newly created XML files.

Problem 2: Manipulating chain of extension without having Java source code:

The updated process took 6 hours, and after it finished and I can start Maximo. However, I freaked out when I looked into the MboSet class used by various objects. For example, in the WorkOrder object, the class used is psdi.pluss.app.workorder.PlusSWOSet. Initially, I thought the custom classes were wiped out after the upgrade. But after some investigation, I realized that due
to the upgrade and installation of new add-ons, Maximo has updated the classes (through the mean of binary code injection) to modify the chain of extension like this:

Before:  YYYWOSet > XXXWOSet > TloamWOSet > PlusPWOSet > WOSet


After:  PlusSWOSet > PlusGWOSet > YYYWOSet > XXXWOSet > TloamWOSet > PlusPWOSet > WOSet


After spending some time reading various IBM tech notes, I learnt that, in the past, we need to create a file with the exact name as: “a_customer.xml” to maintain metadata about customization. In the newer version (not exactly sure from what version, probably 7.5), we actually SHOULDN’T name it “a_customer.xml”. Because the file name makes it top of the list (in alphabetical order), and thus, becomes the first product to extend the core Maximo classes. For example, if you only have Core Maximo, Oil & Gas Add-on, and your custom package, if you name it a_customer.xml, the O&G package name is plusg, thus the extension chain would become: PlusGWOSet > CUSTOMWOSet > WOSet


If I like my custom class to be the last one that extends everything else, I actually should name it z_customer.xml, or anything that comes last in term of alphabetical
order. So I named the product XML files for the two custom packages z1_XXX
and z2_YYY.

For some unknown reasons, using just file name doesn’t give me the desirable outcome (probably due to  some undocumented logic), I had to use the <depends>
tag inside the two product XML files. From my experiment, by having the <depends> tag, the updatedb process will now ignore the file name rule, which means it doesn’t matter if you name it a_customer or z_customer anymore. The classes in your package will be extended after all packages listed in the <depends>
tag

To illustrate this point, below is the <depends> tag of my original z2_YYY.xml file:

It means the YYY package will extend the XXX package, then extend a bunch of packages (which included in the ICD product).

I updated the <depends> tag of the z2_YYY.xml file as follows:

Notice now I inserted three other packages before z1_XXX. After I updated the files, I ran updatedb process again (Even if there’s no update, updatedb will still update the java class files. With newer Maximo versions, you can run updatedblitepreprocessor.bat to do the same). With this, the updated process displays the product installation order as below:

Checking the class files, I got the extension in the desired order:

YYYWOSet > XXXWOSet > TloamWOSet > PlusSWOSet > PlusGWOSet > PlusPWOSet > WOSet

One more note, during the process, I found some of the files that get extended in an endless loop, for example:


YYYWOSet > PlusSWOSet > PlusGWOSet > TloamWOSet
> PlusPWOSet > XXX > TloamWOSet

This caused Maximo to fail when opening the app and crashed Eclipse when I tried to decompile the file. It turned out the reason is I used the wrong XML tag for the class type i.e. I should have used <Mbo….>  and <MboSet…> for object class rather
than <Class…> tag.

Another note is, due to some bugs or unknown logic, I had to play around a little with the product listed in the <depends> tag to get to the desired order as it doesn’t seem to work exactly as documented.

Hope this helps.

Poor performance after Upgrade and Installation of Maximo Add-ons

13 April 2019 / / 0 Comments

This article describes my experience troubleshooting a massive degradation of Maximo performance after installation of some add-ons and upgrading Maximo. The problem was caused by the fragmentation of SQL Server data file. After running defragmentation, query speed improved several times

Problem

Recently I involved in a project where we need to upgrade Maximo to the latest version and install several big add-ons which include SP, HSE (which is Oil & Gas), and Spatial (which is the same as Utilities). This is the first time I see a system with that many add-ons installed. Maximo is running on SQL Server database in this case.

We configured all Websphere settings and ran the upgrade activities as recommended:

  • Run integrity checks before and after the upgrade
  • Update statistics
  • Rebuilt indexes.

After the upgrade, Maximo still ran a lot slower compared to the before-upgrade version.

Cause

To analyse the problem, I tested and compared the performance of several different queries on the WORKORDER table and the TICKET, some intended to use indexes, some intended to create a full table scan. With the queries that use more indices, the performance gap seems to be smaller (upgraded version is 2-3 times slower); and the one which requires full table scan is significantly slower (10-20 times slower).

With that result, we concluded that the slower performance is due to some sort of IO bottleneck

Solution

We defragmented all tables in Maximo and it restored the system’s performance to the level similar to what we have before the upgrade. Since I’m not super experienced with SQL, I never knew that is something we could do to Maximo tables. With the upgrade and installation of several large add-ons, I think because there are thousands of insert/update statements executed, it caused a significant fragmentation of the data stored on disk and thus resulted in the DB must run a lot more IO operations to retrieve data.

Another interesting thing I learned from this project is that the UPDATEDB process took a lot of time. After tried and implemented several things, the whole process still took more than 5 hours. This is quite problematic because the downtime window is way too long for the business to accept. But if we rebuild the indexes and defragmented the tables before running UPDATEDB, then that process only took 3 hours to complete.

Blank parameter page when trying to run report from Eclipse/BIRT Designer

13 February 2019 / / 1 Comment

The issue with Eclipse/BIRT designer showing a blank parameter page when we try to run a report has been around for a while. This problem is due to newer versions of IE installed on Windows. When I was using an older Windows version, I can simply uninstall IE to restore it to an original, older version. Recently, I had to switch to Windows 10 which comes with IE11 and uninstalling IE is not possible. The problem is described here in this IBM technote

After trying the various solutions found on the web, the following seems to work for me:
– In Eclipse, click on Windows > Preference. 
– Then under the General > Web Browser page, check the “Use External Web Browser” selection, and choose “Firefox” as the External Web browser
– In the same Preference dialog, go to the “Report Design” > “Preview”, then in this page, tick on the checkbox “Always use external browsers”
– After that, click on Apply and OK.

“This portlet has not been setup” error in Maximo Start Center

11 January 2019 / / 2 Comments

Introduction

When creating Start Center Template, I often run into the issue of users not being able to see data in result sets with the error ‘This portlet has not been setup‘. I often waste a bit of time to troubleshoot the issue and then forget about it. Repeatedly, I would run into the same issue. This post provides a check list to troubleshoot this problem in the case I hit with this issue in the future. Hopefully it will help some of you Maximo technies out there.

The dreaded “This portlet has not been setup” error

When and Why does it happen?

This issue often occurs to the normal users after deploying a new Start Center to Production. During development, it usually works fine. For a resultset to display on a user’s Start Center several things happen in the background:

  • The user’s Start Center / Resultset need to be generated from the Start Center template.
  • The user must have the permissions to access the data displayed by the Result set

Because of that, several different access permissions must be given to the user for he/she to be able to see the data

Troubleshooting Checklist

To allow the user to access the data, and generate start center from the template, the user must be given the following access:

  • ‘Read‘ access to the main application. For example Work Order Tracking if the result set is for listing work order.
  • ‘Run Report‘ and ‘Create Report‘ signature option in the main application. If the main app is a custom app, you’ll need to create the same Signature Option in App Design first.
  • Access to ‘All Site‘ or at least one Site.
  • Access to the ‘Layout and Configuration‘ application
  • Access to the Report Object structure used by the result set (which is given in the ‘Report Administration’ app > Select Action > Set Report Object Structure Security
  • The Saved Query used by the portlet must be marked “Public“

Process Inbound Twilio SMS message in Maximo

11 September 2018 / / 1 Comment

In my previous post, I provided some demos on how we can process inbound text messages to create SR and route Workflow. There are a few people on LinkedIn asked me how to do it. I also like to explore the option of integrating Maximo with Twilio directly without the need for AppConnect. With Maximo 7.6, we can create a simple API using automation script. To prove the concept, the video demonstrates how we can create a simple API with automation script and direct Twilio HTTP requests to Maximo:


Below is the source code for the script in the video:

In this case, for the sake of simplicity, I only include the bare minimum components to make it works. You will probably want to write some scripts to automatically populate the “Reported By” person based on source phone number and populate other details like location/asset number based on the content of the incoming message. Also, it would be nice to respond with a text message for confirmation and provide the users with the new SR number.

With this method, we’ll need Maximo to be accessible from the Internet, it’s is not a problem for a cloud-based system. But if you have an onpremise system, you’ll need to configure port-forwarding to make Maximo accessible from the Internet. For development, since my ADSL router does not support port-forwarding, I used a tool called ‘ngrok’ to forward access of my local Maximo to the web via ngrok.io

The Scripted API is a new feature in Maximo 7.6. Thus this approach won’t work if you have an older Maximo version. It that case, probably using App Connect is an easier option. With App Connect, I used it for two functions:

  • Act as an API gateway to route Twilio request to a local server
  • Quickly transform HTTP request to REST/JSON request which Maximo can easily consume

App Connect is just a fancy name for a newer version of IBM Integration Bus (which IBM now call it App Connect Enterprise) and a bunch of new cloud-enabling features. So you’ll need some basic understanding of IIB in order to set it up. For connecting App Connect (the cloud component) and local Integration server, I followed the tutorial here: link

Interacting with Maximo via SMS with Twilio

7 September 2018 / / 7 Comments

Voice call and SMS are being used as a user interaction interface in many systems and services provided by large organizations. However, in the past, this integration is quite complex and expensive, and I never had a chance to play around with it. Recently, I posted an article on how we can easily configure Maximo to send SMS notifications. This is made easy and free (for developers) by using Twilio.

Sending inbound commands to a system from Twilio is more complex as it requires setting up a Web Server and writing code to parse HTTP POST requests, then forward the message to an onpremise Maximo system. With App Connect, it becomes easy (and free for developers) to set up an API gateway on the cloud and route messages to a system hosted in-house. I decided to give it a crack by imagining two easy use cases as follows:

  • Field workers send a text message to Maximo to create a new Work Request, or to report a Defect. This could be useful to quickly register an action item without having a smart device or 3G connection. Below is a quick demo of this scenario:
  • A user approves a workflow request by sending a SMS command. This could be useful for supervisors or managers who are always travelling or in meetings and don’t check email often. In many cases, the managers are often given a heads-up call, approving workflow is just a formality to keep record. With such scenarios, just reading the title of the request in a text message will be enough for the approver to say Yes or No, this approach could speed up the approval process. Below is a quick demo for this use case:

There are many other use cases we can implement SMS, MMS, or Voice command to add value. I can quickly think of a few such as

  • Field workers sending an acknowledgement of new work order assignment and confirmation of  scheduled start time entered by planners
  • Driver sending in telemetry data (fuel level, mileage etc.) or technician sending in asset meter data
  • Workers updating actual labour hours to work orders.
  • And whatever simple yet important data you can think of here

For the technical consultants who are interested in App Connect, the image below is how I integrated Twilio with Maximo via App Connect:

This may look a bit complex, but in fact, it is quite simple. The whole process to set up AppConnect, hook up with Twilio and Maximo takes less than 15 minutes. For Maximo on the cloud, I guess we can configure Maximo to hook up with Twilio directly. But I don’t have access to a cloud Maximo environment which I can mess with. So perhaps, that can be saved for a future article.

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