D
dbeavon
Guest
OK, I sort of figured out how to work with multiple "ABL applications" (with potentially multiple web apps referencing them.) I was able to get the scenario working that I described earlier. It was a bit of a challenge to work thru this stuff. First of all, when multiple ABL applications and multiple ABL webapps are in play, the PDSOE does the *least* helpful thing it can possibly do when it publishes your code modules into "catalina.base"\openedge. Essentially this causes all code, whether related or not, to be "flattened" out into the same massive code directory without any organization. That particular directory is shared for the entire PAS instance. After a bit of a struggle with PDSOE, I finally resolved to start with an initial basic deployment of my code that would simply put it out under those folders (caralina.base). Then I'd go into Windows Explorer and moving the published results to a new home: ${CATALINA_BASE}/webapps/mytargetwebapp/WEB-INF/openedge/... This is quite a bit of busy-work. It seems like there should be a checkbox or radio set to select where stuff will be published. Another thing that was challenging was learning how to deal with openedge.properties. It became clear pretty quickly that the relationships between "ABL applications" and "ABL web apps" are more elaborate than what the current user interfaces are able deal with (whether in OEE or PDSOE). So you basically need to manually edit the properties file by hand (go into the "cataline.base"\conf directory to find it) and you need to execute a lot of intermediate "pasman start/stop" commands for your changes to take effect. This seems unfortunate and I wish the U/I was able to manage that file better. The openedge.properties file has a lot of issues. I wish Progress would use XML-based configuration with a hierarchical structure because these properties files have bits and pieces that are spread all over the place in a bit of a haphazard way. Worse yet, if you ever do end up "touching" the properties in a U/I (either via PDSOE or via OEE), then you will regret it because it will randomly rearrange the entire file and nothing will be where you remember it. I do appreciate the ability to have multiple ABL applications in a PAS instance but it is somewhat of a learning curve to get things working properly and there are a LOT of pitfalls; and the crude management user interfaces don't really help us to avoid them. One of the things I would highly recommend is checking your "openedge.properties" into version control and regularly keeping new version of it. This way you can see the differences in the properties as you make incremental changes and, more importantly, you can revert to a previous version if anything goes awry. (For example, at the moment I've somehow lost my "manager" and "oemanager" web apps and I'll have to go back thru my versions and see where they went.) The biggest challenge that I've been struggling with (by far) is not really even related to PAS but related to switching from "shared memory" connections to "client/server" over the network. There is a substantial performance hit for certain programs and I can tell it will be a major effort to re-write some of this legacy code...
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