Why Oscript solutions are not passé

Over the years in my work with OpenText Livelink I am fortunate to associate myself with like minds and who like me share their code,goodwill and advice selflessly .I cherish and hold their friendship above all professional accolades I have ever got.Recently I had lunch with Ossie Moore  Ossie’s LinkedIn it was very short and I would have loved it to last longer as we could talk shop endlessly.Most of what I write in this has bearing to our lunch and he did steer this post. Ossie  for people who do not know him is quite a character.Let’s say you had a requirement,most of us would probably settle for a pretty decent code either in oscript,lapi as that was the predominant development methods one had at the time.Not Ossie he would probably write our kind of code and before releasing it would have at least two more better implementations,he would have thought about the user coming through the web,the other interfaces LL explorer and so on.That is the difference.

Let’s look at ECM deployments in major organizations.

X Organization has identified a massive unstructured data problem.X has a new manager on the block who has had experience with a technology vendor.Insert <vendorname> here. This is how most ECM deployments happen a lot of people passionate in some technology who would solutionize the deployment to suit the vendor.Most of them are assisted by Gartner, Forrester those kinds .I started working in OT technology before these rating companies came up with a barometer of wants so I am going to continue with my cynicism.

So after X Organization will roll out a OOB approach ,people are brought in.Naturally if the product is user friendly and easy its use will grow.Simple things like user activity,data growth etc are good ways to identify its usefulness.Now most people would want to send the link of the objects hoping that it won’t break on re-organizing the structure or re parenting as most of document work revolves around.So you may want to invest on something that people have put thought on like a GUID based system(Livelink, DCTM).Frankly I know only Livelink and DCTM very little. I hate Sharepoint (we call it $carepoint) with a passion because the smallest of things are so difficult to get  done.Good UI all the world has gone for it anything complex you have to buy or build with an array of .net developers different frameworks the works.It also could be that I have only been programming in that and spending time in LL so over the years the idiosyncracies of builder,CSIDE none of these matter to me now because Oscript really has not changed every much.Oscript is just a huge possibilities language. One of my mentors very famous in OT circles John Simon would joke like this.You have a problem you try solving in Oscript.You will spend about 3 to 4 days on it later to find out that what you need is totally available,no need to kludge just poor documentation that is all.

So if you were eager to get into using livelink to its full extent do these things

1. Challenge a OT person or a OT solution marketer to what they are offering you. Challenge them extremely hard if it is offered at $$$ a user or so.That is how they make their money on licenses.
2. Challenge if the pitch is towards Oscript is bad that spoils your chances of upgrade.There’s an element of truth in that.I have seen people hacking their way into core code,weblingo such no nos that shows inexperience and desperation. Oscript is not understanding the creation of a request handler,webnodeaction or eventscripting it is an all round knowledge of the product the passion about the product.You can immediately tell if the programmer knows anything because if they start saying about new subtypes you may want to ask them what prompted them to create a subtype, because many times those people have access to the oscript tutorials and the “Hello World” of oscript introduces them to that.You really want a Oscripter who will follow what OT advises them of doing in that case it is very rarely  a bad fit.
3. Challenge if the pitched solution ends up working only in the webgui what about EC,what about SOAP,what about REST,what about Search

Oscript has years to go if the LL solution is still being used by customers.It can be learned to work wonders for you.The other aspect and full credit to Ossie here is LL software is the most open product much more open than opensource a oscripter can see the entire internals of it so people like me,John,Ossie all have found bugs and we all engage the good OT developers on our finds.Most senior and passionate oscripters continue to do so.There ‘s so much openness and welcoming in the OT programming community,people like David Templeton ,Kyle  Swidrowich and a countless amount of good people who have been striving to keep this open and getting communities to try it out for a better product.They have helped me and a lot of others and you can also get in into the action.

You just need the drive and passion to master LL that is all it takes.Well that maybe true for any technology 🙂

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AddressBook

Today I just chanced to see a post where somebody could not get the famous AddressBook module working.This module was part of the Oscript documentation and is usually introducing the user to the various concepts livelink programming entails.Like a “Hello World” for Oscript :).I thought of helping the person and the person had deleted the post.which was originally here  He later removed it because many people do not want to appear wrong.However there is no harm in asking or being wrong.

 

Anyways I had done this for another friend so releasing into public domain here….

I did not fix many problems in the module so it is a challenge to the person doing it that is how I learned:)

To Undelete or Not

Many times Administrators and users do things stupidly and want to cover their tracks quickly and without creating unwanted attention.Most people working with livelink know that the application is responsible for the data integrity and referential integrity.So to do any proper reversal you would need to script something back.But again here you are at a disadvantage.If you resort to standard OT support the maximum you are going to get is “you have an error that is not easily fixable and we would recommend you to fix it with our professional services team”.To a org or a small company they do not have that many resources or money to do that,hence the administrator or  a power user turned developer would try to see if something can be done.Lo and behold the KB is consulted and most members who would like to show off will post in their comments.Now that goes for me also because there isn’t a day that goes by when I cannot respond to something.However I am very judicious when I tamper with the livelink database.That is really because I understand oscript and I see the many myriad transactions that happen when it is working,doing upgrades and such.But in many organizations people are well versed in Live Reports and many now have the Web Reports product which is an excellent alternative to certain kinds of programming or utility programs .This is where the start of the problems happen.Say you accepted a bad advice like fixing a column or data point in a table that the “learned KB people” advised,you would not probably notice this way into months or years at part of a upgrade so what you did in earnest will land you in irrecoverable or costly difficulties.So RESIST the urge to change values in OT given tables.If it is your table and you are responsible for it do so by all means.There is no problem with you playing in a VM and understanding it but just don’t think that touching llattrblobdata or llattrdata is all it requires to do category updates 🙂

That doesn’t absolve OT as a company,it is expected to do its fair share.Somethings might be

1. Perhaps with support paid the customer gets 10 free incident fixes. OT absorbs the development  cost and passes the solution to a would be  admin/dev in the organization.
2. A list of compiled easy to use reports and utilities,perhaps web reports, perhaps a compiled java app that uses REST or WSAPI or even a utility oscript module.
3. Some re-assurance from support to quell the panic and perhaps advise the customer to do another thing like tell them a deleted user/users necessarily need not be considered a panic situation.

 

I had a short stint working with Documentum and I did not know if the utilities it delivered were high priced like what OT does but it had a language called DQL (Documentum Query Language).So any guys who is knowledgeable on the schema could run reports and turn them into DQL commands which would basically honor data integrity and referential integrity for them.This is in a way WR does but it takes enormous patience and complexity to work with it which again would mean should I have developers supporting my application.I would advise WR people in OT to provide clear crisp examples 1 to 5 liners that should work with any livelink any schema,kind of a pre built library more like the canned Live Reports

 

I tested a user deletion today and tried to see what all tables would be affected so for KB users if you want to see it is here.hopefully I will find a cheap hosting provider to put my content and not in KB as I have been burned in my earlier attempts.

“Why it may not be a good idea to update livelink tables.docx” can be accessed via the following link: https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/cs.dll/Properties/61862916

 

 

 

Amazing Form Product (Mind Blowing)

Anybody who has worked with traditional HTML forms/PDF Forms know how cumbersome its making is in livelink. That is because the form template is rigorously tied to livelink code .The WF /Form developer sits in front of livelink many time not knowing it is submitting to a livelink RH(all those hiddens you should not touch).The submitted POST data is parsed by livelink code to do all the crazy things you want or your manager wants you to deliver to a customer requirement. There is a frantic look for help in this and after perusing the KB for a lot of stuff one finds something and basically in about a week’s time one is able to write something that works. Then comes the big questions like it all looks very kind of unaesthetic. So lo and behold some kind of WYSIWYG editor is employed and lots of colors aesthetics applies and then TONS of java script errors on views….The smart cookies will figure out the JS errors and proceed but all done it is a good effort to do anything with it. In fact most of the Best Practices you will find about editing form templates/forms/views were even taken verbatim from old discussions are findings I posted when I was developing forms etc for my wf /form project years and years ago and they still hold good. The world has gone to WYSIWYG and nobody hires programmers for doing html/JS etc .While OT has their own version of WYSIWYG editor kind of forms (eForms) or something like that it is also not very that easy or intuitive .At least for me when I tried it several years ago so take that with a pinch of salt.

Now compare that to Patrick Vitali’s Product. It is an amazing, jaw dropping revelation to how one uses livelink and its forms capability .I do not work for him nor do I get remunerated for this but a good friend. I also make it a point to reward good things without expecting anything in return. Mind Blowing that is the real word that comes.

http://www.answermodules.com/30-minutes-application/

 

I hope upcoming livelink wf /forms projects get a taste of this product soonJ

 

Transporting Objects with Livelink

Update:10/22/2014

Me and my colleagues recently used this framework for transporting a custom subtype that we designed.We were helped by a kind OT developer All in all it saved our administration team from running XMLEXPORTS and XMLIMPORTS but the key factor is that needs to work for the transport code to work.

Update ends…

Recently OT announced a “Transport” mechanism. Users working in SAP etc are familiar with such a mechanism as changes to a baseline system are marked as configuration changes and ported to other systems.While I am oversimplifying this in a SAP deployment since so many code modules have to be configured it is impossible for an admin to remember what all has to be changed hence they decided at least 20 yrs back an enterprise program needs a transporting strategy as well.

Now lets look at how livelink gets deployed in an org. Mostly Livelink is deployed to address a document management pain/problem.Some consultants or a admin/developer who gets trained in livelink or somebody who has some documentation starts to install/configure this.assuming the person(s) have some common sense and tickets later it is working.Actually the first time install guide is very nicely written and it is mostly a “next” “next” kind of install.

Having configured it the person/persons start modelling the solution.It may involve setting up folders,categories for collecting metadata,classifications for alternative taxonomies,RM classifications ,Permissions(ACL) etc. OT and a lot of ecosystem partners take the money to sometimes set it up.You can make it complicated or simple.

Ok now that it is past the POC phase the next phase is the perhaps a TEST a more formalized place.Now comes the first shock how do I not necessarily duplicate all the work I did on a lower system.Fortunately while there was no advanced GUI or “Transport Bench” mechanism many of these building blocks can easily be transferred by XML IN/OUT operations.Smarter modules such as Classifications/RM anticipated the need for this so they did make their own transport mechanism well ahead of OT. But almost everything one could accomplish in a poor man’s methods

Now in controlled industries like Pharma etc this manual stuff was sheer heresy so companies like Global Cents made excellent products

So why the Transport now. My theory is the entry of integrations between SAP and Livelink.In fact the web services also was something my thought SAP forced OT’s hands.Many SAP customers are now getting a facelift with livelink doing a lot of backend services,pretty gui’s etc.

Here’s an interesting fictitious exchange between different players in a Integration meeting this is circa 2010,2011

SAP Basis Admin-Here we got the xECM thingy and archive server thingy going with OpenText (Notice OT in that because there is no product called that),I sthere anything else you guys need and can I close the client.

OT Consultant- Oh sure but on the next client you have to give me high access to edit the connections,change a few GUID’s(dataids) etc.

SAP Basis Admin-What the …..That means you have to do all this again

OT Consultant-Not everything just a few tweaks and pointing to the livelink admin..Hey Kishore where are we  on the next OT system. Have the ELIB items(categories and folder looking things) coming along

Livelink Admin-I did that according to documentation.

OT Consultant- How about the dataids did you run the queries I gave you for the re-mapping

Livelink Admin-Yeah everything is there

SAP Basis Admin-All the while thinking that what are these guys talking about re-configure every system.I have about 20 different clients I have to maintain.

OT Consultant-Just to prop up the SAP guy,well you know our guys in Germany are coming up with a Transport mechanism just like yours…

Well finally after a lot of back and forths the project is a success

If it is just a DMS project a lot of us have no problem using the old methods.

I am pretty sure the transport mechanism  is a GUI version of  XML Export/XMl Import.

The reason why I wrote this is recently a friend asked if he would be lucky in a project that would not have Object Importer(OI)/Object Exporter(OE) and its RM variations.

I told him this

OI/OE can be leased from OT for a price .They used to entertain that.

With XMLEXPORT/XMLIMPORT here are a few things you would run into.

1. XMLEXPORT is almost available universally but the reverse is not true universally.

. So if one exported PhysObjects the corresponding import will fail.

2. XMLEXPORT will choke on big documents and the number of nodes because of DOM parser limitations. In OE they bundle the file separately so they can get more throughput even though the code invokes a DOM parser there as well.
3. XMLEXPORT/XMLIMPORT is based on source dataids which is not going to match targets. So if you find the xml exported file and change the category id’s to match the target it will work.
4. XMLEXPORT/XMLIMPORT does not understand the hierarchy. For e.g OI will create nodes as it wants enterprise:folder1:::::::::;;;folder99. In XMLEXPORT import you would have to export and follow the reverse process. So if a child object is nested way into a path OI will handle it XML import you will have to handle it
5. Most people will use XMLEXPORT/XMLIMPORT with lapi code so they can manage a lot of things with code in java or a .net lang

Now that GUIDS are part of 10 and 10.5 I do not know how that affects anything

OI/OE is kind of a framework .So with that I was able to transport compound email,email folder and email in a project with relatively less coding.

Readers-Please tell me if the Tranport Bench from OT is good and easy to use and it resolves conflicts et al and I will delete my post.

Java Samples for Content Webservices

 
I LOST ALL CONTENT WHICH WAS STORED IN COMMUNITIES.OPENTEXT.COM.IF YOU ARE A STARTER READING THIS AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CONTENT DEPENDING ON TIME I HAVE I CAN SEND YOU SNIPPETS.LEAVE A COMMENT TO SUCH EFFECT.

Java Samples for Content Webservices are few and far in between.OT mainly puts samples in C# and many  a times I myself wonder if my company did not allow me to do that how I would do that in Java.In all truth OT ships a massive application called TreeView.java and TreeView.s ln for both languages .But the java thing takes a lot of setup especially if one was not keeping active in that world.However I used the NetBeansIDE to actually do most of that so I use that debugging environment to try all my java stuff Recently I debugged how to run a Live Report in livelink via C# webservices.Then somebody wanted me to show them how to do it via Java.One of these days I want to return to seeing if I can do all this command line with nothing else other than notepad.

Well I created two word documents, my guess is the poster did not speak english  very well,did not know livelink nor did know java to start with  .Hence I dumbed it enough for people to follow in almost any criteria.

 

Having livelink and its builder helps me in my endeavours and so Oscript remains my first love although I am getting farther and farther from it all

 

I have these files in the Communities website

If I had a LR taking a string parameter  how to write that in Java(C# is available aplenty)

If I had a LR taking a integer parameter how to write that in Java(C#is available aplenty)

There is a bug with Live Report Extensions.A poster in KB said that OT is aware of it.

Why Having LR Extensions(something that Webreports) company produces breaks Livereport calling with Webservices of OT

 

 

Important Free Developer Links

UPDATE 1/25/2015-I LOST ALL CONTENT WHICH WAS STORED IN COMMUNITIES.OPENTEXT.COM.IF YOU ARE A STARTER READING THIS AND WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE ORIGINAL CONTENT DEPENDING ON TIME I HAVE I CAN SEND YOU SNIPPETS.LEAVE A COMMENT TO SUCH EFFECT.

has been retired.The Developer area now is DEVELOPER.OPENTEXT.COM (Requires a Self  Registration based account)

 

 

Nothing much but since OT (Livelink) material is not free to come by severely restricted by licensing/protectionism et al

Communities was a livelink site OT maintained free to users who registered

Oscript Questions and many many examples

Web Services

Livelink Search API -When you install livelink you are getting the beautiful Restful API free Of course

The now out of favor LAPI

Most OT programmers who are in this business for some time have accounts to Livelink’s Knowledge base and it is fun

believe me.I just published these so that starting developers have some material if they are self taught.

To Err is Java,to Forgive Oscript

The first time I learned that a piece of java code could be called from Oscript was in 2005.This was closely after the debacle of the Java Modules development that OT wanted people to follow.Not sure what the programming paradigm was but to me it looked like you would do Java coding and oscript coding simultaneouslytto get something done.In any case it died a natural death and we are not discussing here.The Home RH which is remnant is what people would remember of that.

We are discussing Oscript to Java Bridge which is a great help to you if you wanted to do something.That somethings could be

1. Call a web Service form oscript bypassing the socket stuff
2. Whatever you could get java to do and get it to use in livelink

Now Hans stoop of OT Germany was the first person to tell the developer world this and people started on that in earnest.I was a natural taker and I basically took Rolf Poser’s approach which     was a oscript module that spit out some java strings.Naturally to learn I created a Request Handler and put it for general consumption 

Notice I have given all credits where it is due as these good programmers have kept the OT programming environment proactively upward without which it would be a very sorry affair.Now for newer developers if there is no time to research anything then you have only you to blame.For one thing I think if you do not understand class paths and if you cannot understand how java code works and thought Eclipse and Netbeans were there from day one,I reserve my comments.I still like to use a notepad to write java code and compile them.Enough of digression here is the quick things you need to do.

1. Always True Statement #1-Builder IDE does not load the JVM by default.You have to “tweak” the builder shortcut.It is basically written in the builder documentation as well as in several other published examples
2. Always True Statement #2-Livelink is going to use the JRE, again JRE that ships with the livelink application so make sure your code is compiled on that  JVM. See JVM’s in 9.7.1 and 10 in my screen caps.
3. Always True Statement #3-The class loader of service and builder is different,which brings me to my acronym OMH(Over My Head) see these threads where java people talk about it.I always make sure I can see ‘Hello World’  in my builder output.The ‘HelloWorld’ e.g settles the environment problems and then we can think of Relections et al.

Link to a word document with screen caps and some important links

As time permits I will see if I can put up an example for doing something with Java on CS10

BTW Java is a great language but do understand that the world was not built by Java although increasingly OT is moving things that really don’t belong in livelink to java based offerings. A java coup d’état    ? We  have seen OTDS and then Oclipse…. H’mm sounds fishy to me.

Customizing to put your company stuff in CS10

In CS10 it comes up with this kind of deal see img

Now in 9.7 and below there was perhaps the [Chicklet] method one used to out a new banner

Here is a quick and dirty way

1. Option .Edit the file that is called custom.js in /support/appearances/custom.js a zero byte file and a custom.png is supplied by OT .One could just add some simple javascript to do this Put code like this in img/appearances/custom.jsjavascript:document.write(“Hello World!”);javascript:document.write(“<img src=\”/img/appearances/custom.png\”>”);

   anything that you can do with custom.js will be put on that page

2. Option -This is contribution of my friend Madhukar Kampe.He wrote to me
   Go to location OTHome\support\style\images\ . Here you find many images. The images of our interest are below.

   – logo_otcs224x43.png (this is the image that appears to the left side by default)

   – banner_right_ecmsuite320x43.png (this is the one that appears to the right one by default)

   Now we can edit this images to whatever images we want by not changing the names. Below are the before and after screens

How to Parse a Node’s categories in C# WCF code

****************************************** ***START UPDATE 10/3/2016*****************

LAPI and its client installer has become very hard to find. Moreover clients written in LAPI  in say Java/.NET will only work if your Livelink a.k.a Content Server is of version less than CS16.Readers who are new to LL programming is encouraged to read this to the approach and not to the exact lines of the code.What I mean is when you used to program in LAPI you were basically passing parameters to discrete calls by modelling it based on the webgui of livelink .SOAP based webservices called CWS is also the same,so if you do not try to do the task in the webgui and try to understand the business rules you will almost have no success in CWS too. OT is notorious for not putting fully functioning use cases and a walk through,so whenever possible I write code assuming the user has not worked in Livelink for X number of years and try to educate you all. Livelink,Content Server,Enterprise Server all of this has been Livelink’s marketing brand name changes over the years.CS i sused in many of the integrations like AGA, XECM, RMLINK  and you know you are programming against livelink if you see a link that looks like this  http(s)://somefriendlyURL/livelink.exe|cs.exe|llisapi.dll|cs.dll|livelink.In many places SAP/ SP /Exchange will be configured to talk to Archive Server and then they will use Livelink to read into archive server and turn that into LL objects for better presentment/RM and other aspects. The AGA product is moving away from LAPI(not sure totally or not) to REST API in LL.

**********************************************END UPDATE****************************

Recently a programmer asked me how you would show the values in a nodes categories.He had done all except up to the fact that he did not know how to get the

real values hidden in Stringvalue, Integervalue, boolean etc.I don’t remember seeing a good example but C#’s good debugger helped me.Also quite a posts form people like Sean Walker,Rob Vanderpoel

helped me understand the structure although I like seeing simple full samples rather than snippets

After you get the AttributeGroups,you have to go into that and get the DisplayName and keys and based on the type you have to cast that value making sure to handle nulls as well

perhaps now I can write better set attributes because i was wondering how one would write a generic call with the examples in OT.

I was able to do this in about 1.5 hrs and learned something as well.The code was done in a hurry and based off Jason Smith’s starter examples

here’s a link in case somebody needs it

 

Or email exchange hiding the actual names etc

Hi Appu,

Thank you for this information, it is very similar to what the REMOVED NAME consultant has produced so far, however the part we are stuck with is getting from the “Key” value to the actual data shown in Livelink.

For example the output for the document you reference below looks something like:

Display Name: Title –- Its key is: 122343.9.24

We would like to see:

Display Name: Title –- Its value is: WEB SERVICES NEED BETTER EXAMPLES

Is this something that you have been able to accomplish? There doesn’t seem to be any calls to make the jump from Key to Value.

Thanks,