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Issue 4, 2014 |
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Service Results view in Software AG Designer
Welcome to another Hidden Gem, where we highlight a lesser-known but valuable feature of the webMethods suite. There are many such hidden gems that you might not have stumbled upon in training or documentation, but could make your life easier or your implementation even better. This edition’s hidden gem is the Service Results view in Software AG Designer.
What is the Service Results view?
Software AG Designer is an Eclipse®-based IDE that enables you to create and maintain a wide number of applications, services, tasks and other components to implement and execute your solutions in the webMethods suite. Software AG Designer provides a set of service development features that you can use to build, edit, and debug services and integration logic. It provides a collection of editors and views in which you can develop the logic and supporting objects (referred to as elements) for an integration solution. It also provides tools for running and debugging the solutions you create.
The Results view is a new view in the Service Development perspective that displays the results for all services or business rules decision entities run in a Designer session. Also, the Results view displays the results of flat-file schema tests.
The Results view contains a list of the recently run services and displays the results for the selected service. Results for all runs in the current session are stored in the Designer workspace. They are cleared automatically when Designer is restarted, or when you click the remove button in the results panel.
When you run a service, Designer displays the results in the Results view. This view contains a list of the recently run services on the left in the history pane and displays the results for the selected service on the right pane as shown in Figure 1. By default, the last executed service will be on top of the list.
Figure 1: Service Results view
For each service execution, the Results view offers:
- A Messages tab to display any messages from Designer about the launch configuration and any exceptions thrown by the service during execution
- A Call Stack tab to identify the flow step that generated the error and lists its antecedents as shown in Figure 2; the call stack tab is only applicable to a flow service
- A Pipeline tab to display the contents of the pipeline at the time the service finished executing
Figure 2: Call stack showing error message
You can specify the number of Service Results that Designer displays in the view using the “number of results to display” option in the Results View preferences page as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Preferences for Service Results view
You need to keep in mind that putting a very high value for “number of results to display” could degrade performance because history is only stored in-memory. If you have very large input/output data and you are saving a lot of it, you may see some performance degradation. To avoid this, reduce the number of results to display and also save the results either locally or remotely.
What are key actions you can take from the Service Results view?
As shown in Figures 3 and 4, you can choose to use the View Menu option or the individual buttons to perform certain actions based on the results in this view.
Figure 4: View menu in the Service Results view
The buttons highlighted in Figure 5, the Service Results view, provide functionality such as “remove a result” or “remove all the results” from the view. You can also choose to save the pipeline or restore pipeline from server or locally. You also can locate the failed service in the Package Explorer. You can choose to hide/show the history pane and also arrange the history in ascending/descending order by name. You also can choose to store the results both locally or remotely in case the result data is too large.
Figure 5: Usage of the buttons on the Results view
How do you pin a result in the Results view?
Pinning a result in the Results view ensures that the particular result is available for your reference in the Results view even after several other service executions. You can unpin the result from this view when you no longer need to refer to it. When you pin a result, the next time you execute a service, Designer shows the results in a new Results view.
Figure 6: Pinning a result in the Results view
When you pin a result to the Results view, Designer closes the pane that displays the list of the recently run services and displays only the pinned result. You are then unable to perform operations such as re-executing the service or element from Results view and removing service results from Results view.
How can you re-execute a launch configuration or a flow service re-using the same set of inputs in the Results view?
As seen in Figure 6, you can select a service that you want to re-launch from history and the input dialog will auto fill with the same input data as was used at that time.
To re-run services from Results view, select the service or element you want to re-execute and click on the Results view toolbar as shown in Figure 7. Integration Server re-executes the service or element using the same set of inputs as before. In the 9.7 version of Designer, a keyboard shortcut CTRL + R was added to make this convenient.
Figure 7: Re-run launch configuration using the same input data
For more information
The Service Results view in the Service Development perspective is available in Software AG Designer 9.5 and higher. You can find detailed documentation on these features in Designer Service Development Help available at:
techcommunity.softwareag.com/welcome-documentation.