TIF ENOVIA/3DExperience Connector - Overview

23 August 2013

1. Overview

The ENOVIA/3DExperience connector is a module within TIF that knows about ENOVIA/3DExperience and how to connect with the ENOVIA/3DExperience database. The ENOVIA/3DExperience connector is installed below the ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia folder, from now on referred to as the module home directory.

Please also read the chapter "Installation Overview" in this document in order to understand the different connection alternatives. In case you don’t connect with ENOVIA/3DExperience in RIP mode (the default mode), then you need to configure the enovia host connection within the "tvc.custom.properties" file (see chapter below).

enovia.host = http://server:8001/internal

1.1. Directory Layout

Within the enovia module directory, you will have a number of sub-directories:

etc

Contains for example

  • The properties file controlling the behavior of this module

  • The properties file used when initializing TVC.

    • Note that the ENOVIA/3DExperience Connector is built upon the TVC-Core framework. (TVC =Technia Value Components)

  • Configuration file for scheduled jobs.

lib

The JAR files required by the ENOVIA/3DExperience connector. Custom jar files are stored in a sub folder of the lib folder.

cfg

Holds the configuration files. Mainly XML configuration files, but others like XSLT/Freemarker templates/XML Schemas are also located here) that you are using inside your integration jobs.

Might for example be job-configurations, payload definitions, data-sets, tables, inquiries etc.

This directory contains the similar file as you use in the ordinary ENOVIA/3DExperience web-application below the WEB-INF/tvc folder (in case you are using TVC as a part of your ENOVIA/3DExperience application).

webapps

Contains custom web-applications, which this module has. By default, there are a couple of applications available like the administration UI, RESTful Webservice support and SOAP based Webservice support.

Never modify the original properties files that are part of the distribution. For example instead of changing the module.properties file directly, add another file in the same directory called module.custom.properties and add your settings there.

The customized properties file is propagated with the original file upon start up, and the customized file takes precedence over the original.

1.2. JAR File Loading

Your integrations requires the same JAR files as you have in your ENOVIA/3DExperience application, such as the eMatrixServletRMI.jar among others. Hence these JAR files must be available for the ENOVIA/3DExperience Connector in TIF in order to work correctly.

There are two options how to ensure that TIF uses these JAR files, namely:

  1. In the start script to TIF, point out the root directory of your ENOVIA/3DExperience web-application. TIF will during start up scan the directories WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib and include the resources in the class-path automatically.

  2. Copy required JARs from the WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes into the lib/custom folder.

    1. The minimum required JAR files are:

      • eMatrixServletRMI.jar

      • enoviaKernel.jar

      • FcsClient.jar

      • FcsClientLargeFile.jar

      • Mx_jdom.jar

The first alternative is the recommended approach since that reduces the risk of not having the content synchronized between the app-server and the TIF server.

If you for some reason cannot link directly to your ENOVIA/3DExperience web-application root directory, you can possibly copy the whole application to some place on the TIF server.

Never add your own JAR files into the lib directory. Instead, put your custom JAR files into the lib/custom (you might need to create this directory unless there).

1.3. Configure TVC Properties

If you need to change or apply some TVC specific setting (init parameter), then you can do so by creating a file called tvc.custom.properties within the directory ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc.

In there you add the parameters using property file format (key = value).

1.4. Multiple Instances

Before reading this, ensure that you also read this chapter.

If you wish to configure things different per TIF instance, you should create a file called ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc/${INSTANCE_ID}.properties and add the instance specific configuration in there.

The order the properties files are read is:

  1. ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc/module.properties

  2. ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc/module.custom.properties

  3. ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc/module.custom-{instance-id}.properties

  4. ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc/module.custom-{node-id}.properties

  5. ${TIF_ROOT}/modules/enovia/etc/module.custom-{node-id}-{instance-id}.properties

When setting up multiple instances of TIF you should consider for example if all instances should poll the default queue in ENOVIA/3DExperience for new jobs, or if all instances should listen to the same JMS/MQ/AMQP queues.

Also see the this chapter for additional information about reply handlers and use of JMS correlation id’s and IBM-MQ group id’s.