Posts Tagged TIBCO
adding IP-restriction to BusinessWorks processes
Recently I got into the situation that somebody used some interface a way it was not designed for and so created an out-of-memory situation which couldn’t be handled by the engine itself. So now I got the case that one client block the complete service due to invalid requests which he shouldn’t do in the first place.
In the short term there seemed to be only one solution, block the client. So I began to search around how this could be done.
The easiest way to achieve this would be to change the authentication for this service. Unluckily this service is used by a lot of other clients, so I can’t change it out of the blue. Next thing that came to my mind was using the underlying tomcat to do some IP-based blocking. After some searching around I gave that one up. Tibco has a really complex deployment model for BusinessWorks so I wasn’t able to even find the process-specific section for the tomcat engine.
After some searching around in the documentation (actually several hours – hooray to a usable documentation) I found some parameter which allows you to block IPs with some TRA-file parameters. In case you want to look it up yourself it is in the BusinessWorks documentation under ‘Administration’ -> Chapter 8 ‘Custom Engine Properties’ -> ‘Available Custom Engine Properties’ (and another hooray to the excellent formatting – Note to Tibco: HTML has tags, so you can do more with the content then continuous text – even some breaks would enhance the experience).
So back to the point:
bw.plugin.http.server.allowIPAddresses
bw.plugin.http.server.restrictIPAddresses
Both tags are rather self explanatory so you can use right away. Tibco says you can use it with a single IP, a list of IPs (comma-separated) or regular expression. As stated before this highlight of a documentation doesn’t say what reg-exp syntax means. I guess Tibco means they use the Tomcat engine for evaluation of these values an that means they use the Java syntax described here.
writing Unicode characters to Oracle with TIBCO BusinessWorks
As always, I get the most puzzling mysteries from work requirements. I got the requirement of sending an email with Russian characters through TIBCO BusinessWorks. So far so good. BusinessWorks has full support of Unicode, so it should be not a problem to get this one running. Lucky me the reality looks different.
For this email system a database template system was used and of course the database was an upgraded Oracle 10g, so all the columns (for historic reasons) were Latin-1 and not Unicode.
But a simple Google query even showed a solution for this problem. Oracle introduced, exactly for this case, a new data type (NCHAR – means Unicode character). After changing the table column from CLOB to NCLOB the database should have the ability to store Unicode characters, even if it is running in Latin-1 mode.
First thing I tried, was to insert a valid Russian email template into the database and lucky me, the text which was stored in the database, was still a bunch of invalid Latin-1 characters (character code 0xbf).
After quite some googling I came to this Oracle article. In that article Oracle explains a bit more how to force the JVM to use Unicode characters for the JDBC connection instead of the character set presented from the database. With nothing to lose I tried it in my designer via modifying the designer.tra (I just appended the following parameter).
-DOracle.jdbc.defaultNChar=true
After that, it worked like a charm. Now it was possible to write Unicode characters to the new created NCLOB columns in the database.
After creating the template and doing a trial run I got curious what would happen if I removed that parameter and tried to read from the Unicode column. To my surprise it worked out-of-box. So you can read Unicode characters from an Oracle database without modifying anything. The indifferences just happen if you want to write via JDBC.
To round this up this bug is not limited to TIBCO BusinessWorks. I also tried it with a tool named DbVisualizer (also Java based) and (what really annoys me, because it is c-based and shouldn’t have this JDBC bug) tora. All showed the same result on writing to that database.
TIBCO Designer with external memory window
During Research for my last blog post I found an interesting feature of the designer. If the designer uses more than one gigabyte of heap memory, the display of the memory usage gets a bit fuzzy.
Obviously somebody at TIBCO forgot to round the value, so it would fit into this small section of the status bar.
Keeping that in mind I found a start parameter which allows you to start the designer with an external window which only displays the current memory load.
As you can see this is much more useful then the default.
To get this you just have to start the designer with the following command:
./designer -memory
I wonder how much more (undocumented) functionality is hidden in the designer.