Capturing HTML Packets

While troubleshooting TRIRIGA, you may find yourself needing to analyze the traffic between a workstation and the server or the traffic between your app/process server and the database server. Here are the basic instructions for using the open source application Wireshark to capture this network traffic.

Download and install Wireshark from here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wireshark/wireshark-setup-1.0.0.exe

After you get it installed, start it up; under the menu go to "Capture -> Interfaces". It should pop up a dialog showing all the network interfaces on the box; generate some traffic (open a web page etc.) and the "Packets" column should start counting up. That's the interface you want to sniff. From that dialog, click the "Options" button next to the interface that you identified. In the "Capture Filter" field of the options dialog, enter the following:

host ServerName && (port 80 || port 443 || port 8080 || port 8443 || port 8001)

(assuming ServerName is the server you want to monitor). Then click start. Go perform whatever operation you need to trace. Then select "Capture -> Stop" from the menu when it's done. Then save the result (pcap format should be the default, which is correct).

Multi-Line Field Labels

In the GUI, if you have a long label text it pushes the other fields in the section out to the same length which can make the layout look bad. For example, in the image below the "Please enter the Estimated Retirement Date" field label is too long.


To solve this issue an break sequence can be added to split the label to multiple lines as shown below.


Here are the steps:

1. In tririgaweb.properties, remove "<", ">" and "&" from the EXCLUDE_CHARACTERS line. It should look like this: EXCLUDE_CHARACTERS={
2. Save tririgaweb.properties. Make the same changes on your process server, if applicable
3. Restart Jboss, Weblogic or WebShpere on all app and process servers
4. In the GUI Builder, Revise the GUI, select the field and edit the label as shown below by inserting a break sequence where you want to split the label
5. Apply the changes and Publish the GUI
   

Change the Browser Title

If you want to change the Browser Title (the words that display at the top of your web browser), simply add the following line to tririgaweb.properties:

browserTitle=Workplace Central

Setting up Flexible Menus

In TRIRIGA 2.5 and higher flexible menus can be added to the portal. These are essentially short cuts to portal sections. The image below shows what flexible menus look like.

Setting these up is not very difficult, and to make it just a little easier a colleague of mine put together a document describing exactly how to do it. Click here to download the PDF document.
Thanks Srinath!

Troubleshooting System Performance

A big complaint at many organizations running TRIRIGA is that performance is not where they want it to be. Performance tuning can be very challenging and is often not the result of any one problem; typically there are several contributing issues. Here is a list of things to look at if you are having performance issues:

• Make sure your hardware is appropriately sized. TRIRIGA will typically help you with this. You just need to provide them the details of how you use (or anticipate to use) the system, such as number of users, average number of new objects you add per day, number of objects in the system etc.
• Verify that your database and application/process servers have sufficient memory allocated to them. Make sure you have sufficient memory on your severs to support the values you use
• Optimize portal performance by removing as many queries as possible from portals and eliminate or at least cut back on the use of auto-refresh.
• Upgrade to a current platform release – TRIRIGA is constantly improving the platform. Check the release notes for all of the more current platforms to determine if any new enhancements can help you.
• Try to determine if the performance issues are related to the database or to process/app servers. Check memory & CPU usage to help determine this
• Have a DBA capture long running SQL queries by running Statspack, and try to determine where they originate in the system. Many come from queries within the system that can be tuned to perform better. I have a post on my blog about this: http://www.tririga.info/2008/01/analyzing-long-running-sql-queries.html.
• Disable any unnecessary workflows. For example, if you don't use out of box approvals or notifications you can bypass a lot of system overhead by disabling these workflows, even on a per-module basis. (Be careful here if you are not familiar with workflows)
• Check the database for disproportionate table sizes. I had a customer with 250 million rows in IBS_SPEC_ASSIGNMENTS and only 10 million rows in IBS_SPEC
• Get a count of all objects in the database to be sure what you have is what you expect; you may find yourself with 250k discussion threads that you never use. Here is an article in my blog on how to do this: http://www.tririga.info/2008/01/get-count-of-all-objects-in-trirga-9.html
• Try to isolate specific actions that perform poorly, like creating a particular type of record. Analyze what the system does internally when these actions occur. Try to determine if a specific workflow or query is causing the problem and work to fix it.

If you have anything to add to this list, please let email me and let me know.

Find Corresponding Object and Module Names

Do you know the name of a BO you are looking for, but can't figure out which module it's in? Here is a script to run under the tririga schema:

/* Get BO and corresponding Module Names - run in tririga schema */
SELECT b.NAME AS bo_name, m.module_name
FROM module_view_map m, ibs_spec_type b
WHERE m.module_id = b.spec_class_type
ORDER BY NAME

Utility for Viewing Configuration and Log Files

Notepad++ is a fantastic, open source utility to view and edit TRIRIGA configuration and log files (it has many other uses as well). If you are tired of looking at a jumbled mess in notepad, try Notepad++.