Maximo Consultant's Blog

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Consider Time Zone with automation script

13 December 2022 / / 0 Comments

It took me some time to get to this piece of code, but requirement changed and I needed to ditch it. But I’m sure I’ll need to use it at some point in the future, so why not put a note here just in case.

Requirement: 

– A client has many hotels in Sydney and Brisbane which are in two different time zones. Sydney has daylight saving while Brisbane doesn’t have. In other words, there is one hour difference for half of the year, and no time difference for the other half.

– Client wants to display a warning message to the user that when he/she raised a service request out of normal working hours (7AM to 7PM), if it’s a high priority item, they should make a phone call instead.

Finding:

– User profile has a time zone setting. We can also associate a time zone to a specific site or location

– Time stored in the database is server time. In this case, the server is in Sydney, as such all date/time values are Sydney time. The time zone associated to site or location won’t affect the time values in Work Order (e.g. reporteddate)

– Time displayed on the screen is converted to user’s time zone.

– Therefore, if we use a conditional expression with a standard SQL where clause, or create a saved query using the time part, it can be inaccurate due to the values are all Sydney time

Example:

– During summer time when there is daylight saving in Sydney, there is 1h difference between Brisbane and Sydney. A user in Brisbane creates a ticket at 6:30 PM for a location in Sydney, that would be 7:30 PM. 

– If we consider user’s time zone, that’s still within working hours. If we consider the site’s time zone, that’s off hours. Based on that, we might want to display our warning accordingly.

– The custom conditional expression automation script below works for me:

– In the case we just want to convert time to one specific zone, we can use the java.util.TimeZone class:

from java.util import TimeZone

timeZone = TimeZone.getTimeZone("Australia/Sydney")

Issues with Maximo attachment (DOCLINKS)

22 August 2022 / / 0 Comments

Just a bunch of my personal notes about Maximo attachment (DOCLINKS)

  •  When a file is attached to a record in Maximo, it creates a record in the DOCLINKS and a record in the DOCINFO table to keep the details of the file. The file is copied to a location on disk, usually on a local folder (e.g. D:DOCLINKS) or on a shared network folder. The path for Maximo to read the file is kept in the URLNAME field of the DOCINFO table.
  • To set up this function, refer to this blog post by Bruno
  • When a user uploads an attachment, the location where Maximo puts the file will depend on the Folder selected:
  • In most applications such as Work Order Tracking or Assets, there is a Select Action > Attachment Library/Folders > Manage Folder function, it allows you to specify the location to keep the file for each Folder.
  • If no path is specified for a folder, Maximo uses the default value of the System Properties:  mxe.doclink.doctypes.defpath
  • This setting controls where to keep the file when uploading. After a migration or upgrade in which you moved your file server location, and if new files still end up in the old location. This is where you should update your settings
  • When a user clicks on the link to download an attachment, there are two methods for Maximo to serve the file.
  • If System Property: mxe.doclink.securedAttachment is set to False (default), the HTTP Web Server will read the file from disk, then serve it to the end-users. Maximo application server doesn’t play a role in delivering the file here.
  • If System Property: mxe.doclink.securedAttachment is set to True, when the end-user downloads an attachment, Maximo application server will grab the file, encrypt it, then serve it to the end-user. Thus, in this case, we don’t really need the web server for it to work. I.e. if you accessing Maximo directly on the application server (via port
    908x), it will still work. Thus, in a clustered environment in which a load balancer distributes load directly to Maximo JVMs without a web server in the middle, this is the recommended choice.
  • The link to download an attachment is kept in DOCINFO.WEBURL non-persistent field. The value of this field is generated by replacing the URLNAME field of the DOCINFO record, with the rule set in the mxe.doclink.pathXX property. 
  • For example, if you have the following rule: mxe.doclink.path01=D:DOCLINKS=https://maximo.company.com/attachments/ For a document with URLNAME=D:DOCLINKSdrawingfile01.pdf, the WEBURL would be https://maximo.company.com/attachments/drawing/file01.pdf. If the first part of URLNAME doesn’t match with the left-side of the PATH01 equation, Maximo will look at mxe.doclink.path02,path03 and so on to replace the value and generate a WEBURL. If there’s no match, it will generate WEBURL with an absolute path: file://[URLNAME]. This means that if the user has access to the file on the shared network path, it will still work without the need for a web server.

In summary, I usually hit with issues with doclinks after an upgrade or migration,  I use the following checklist to avoid those issues:

  • If a new Web server is set up, need to update the DocumentRoot, and the Directory settings in the web server’s httpd.conf file
  • If the Web URL to access Maximo changes: need to update mxe.doclink.path01
  • If the file server location was moved:
    • Need to copy the file to the new location
    • Maximo service account should have permission to access the local/network folder
    • Update:
      • mxe.doclink.doctypes.topLevelPaths
      • mxe.doclink.doctypes.defpath
      • mxe.doclink.path01
    • Update the DOCTYPES.DEFAULTFILEPATH in
      the database with a REPLACE SQL command
    • Update all DOCINFO.URLNAME in the database with a REPLACE SQL command

 

How to test SMTP with PowerShell for setting up Maximo email notifications?

30 July 2022 / / 0 Comments

In an enterprise IT environment, it is sometimes difficult to set up Maximo to talk with SMTP service due to networking and security restrictions. To troubleshoot SMTP configuration, in the past, we used Telnet from the CMD tool. However, in newer versions of Windows Server, Telnet is often not installed by default. In such cases, we can use PowerShell to test and confirm the SMTP and firewall setting is working before configuring SMTP in Maximo.

The first thing I would do is check whether firewall has been opened so that the port used by SMTP service (e.g. port 25) is reachable from the Maximo server. I’ve provided details on how to do this with PowerShell in this post: Check network firewall status with PowerShell 

Once it is confirmed SMTP service is reachable, the next step I would do is to ensure we can send an email with the provided login details. Thus, from PowerShell running on the Maximo server, I would do the following commands:

Note that if SMTP service doesn’t require authentication, we don’t need to run the first command and use the parameter -Credential $cred in the second command.

Replace placeholder values with actual details required by your SMTP service, and for the -To parameter, enter your email address.

The Send-MailMessage command will send an email using your SMTP
service. If it works, you should receive an email.

Once SMTP service is confirmed working, I’ll go ahead putting the details to System Properties in Maximo and that should be it.

To test that Maximo can send emails, the simplest way I would
do is to open any work order, then use the Select Action > Create >
Communication, then entering my own email into the “To” address field. If it
works, after clicking on Send, it should show a successful status, and you’ll
receive an email within seconds. Otherwise, you might want to look at
SystemOut.log file to see if there are any details of the error there.

Websphere messaging engine cannot be started as there is no runtime initialized for it yet

20 May 2022 / / 0 Comments

I sometimes have issues with message engine not running. Usually I’ll just try to restart the whole system and hope that it goes away.

If it doesn’t work, in most cases, it is caused by a corrupted file store used by the message engine and the suggestion from the Internet is to delete these files, which seems to work fine.

Sometimes, with the message engine uses a database store, I had a very similar issue. I find it quite hard to find out the exact root cause. So I chose the easier path by simply deleting the whole message engine, create a new one, giving a new schema name for the data store. This ensures it creates new tables when message engine is initialized the first time. 

Creating a new message engine and re-assigning bus destinations usually take less than 5 minutes, and it seems a lot easier than troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issue.

Maximo fails to connect to SQL Server database

20 May 2022 / / 0 Comments

In a recent upgrade, I had to get Maximo 7.6.1.2 to work with SQL Server 2019 (15.0.4198.2 – Jan/2022). 

Initially, I thought I needed to replace the JDBC driver that comes with Maximo with the latest JDBC driver version (10.2). However, it doesn’t solve the issue.

After searching the Web, I came across an article which suggests the problem is due to the new SQL Server version requires SSL protocol TLS 1.2 .

Thus, I managed to fix the issue by adding this parameter to the end of the JDBC connections string: sslProtocol=TLSv1.2;

The full connection string will look as follows:

mxe.db.url=jdbc:sqlserver://;serverName=[SERVERNAME];databaseName=[DBNAME];portNumber=1433;integratedSecurity=false;sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false;sslProtocol=TLSv1.2;

The other method that seems to work too is adding this parameter: -Dcom.ibm.jsse2.overrideDefaultTLS=true to the JVM argument of the Application server, or execution command of any tools running Java such as ScriptBuilder.bat, UpdateDB.bat or IntegrityUI.bat

For example, for the integrityui.bat tool, I edit the file and update it as below:

@..javajrebinjava -Dcom.ibm.jsse2.overrideDefaultTLS=true -Dswing.handleTopLevelPaint=false -classpath %MAXIMO_CLASSPATH% psdi.configure.UpgradeUI -i

Update Aug/2023: I recently had the following database connection error when running UpdateDB.bat with SQL Server 14 SP1:

com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerException: The driver could not establish a secure connection to SQL Server by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Error: "com.ibm.jsse2.util.j: PKIX path building failed

Without digging into which version of TLS is being used, I got it running by adding the following two parameters to the connection string in maximo.properties file: 

encrypt=true;trustServerCertificate=true
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