Issue 1, 2014 |
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There are many hidden gems in the webMethods platform that you may not have stumbled upon in training or documentation but these features can make your life easier and your implementations even better. This is the first of a series of articles where I will highlight lesser-known but valuable features of webMethods. This article’s hidden gem is property templates in webMethods Designer.
What are property templates?
When you create a new Integration Server service in Designer, you get an empty service to start off with. That empty service has a standard set of properties for state-fullness, audit logging, error handling, caching, etc. If you set up a property template, you can define a different set of default values for the properties of new services you create using that template.
Why use property templates?
Your company or team may have defined programming standards and best practices that dictate how to configure audit logging, for example. If you define and share templates with your team’s agreed standards, then there is less effort required to change the properties manually for every new service and less chance of developers forgetting to set them correctly.
How to use property templates?
You can define property templates in Designer by going to Windows > Preferences > Software AG > Service Development > Element Property Templates as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Property templates in webMethods Designer
You can define multiple templates per type of service, as shown in Figure 2, and you can export/import them to other developers on the team
Figure 2: Create property templates with ease.
When creating a new service in Designer, you can choose which template to use from the Create dialog as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Use property templates when creating new services.
You can even apply a template to an already existing service through the context menu as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Select and apply a property template to an existing service
More information
Property templates are available in webMethods Designer 8.2 and higher. You can find detailed documentation on property templates in the Designer Service Development Help, available in the documentation section of the Tech Community or the documentation website at http://documentation.softwareag.com.
Let us know what you think of our new Hidden Gems series. And look for another hidden gem in the next issue of TECHniques.