The REN Server – an Overview and a Neat Trick – Part 2 of 2 February 13, 2008
Posted by Duncan in PeopleTools.trackback
This is part 2 of 2. See the companion post here.
The Trick
The neatest trick I’ve heard relating to the REN Server came from Chris Heller and Larry Grey who were over for the UKOUG last year. They drew my attention to the ‘NotifyToWindow’ method of the PrcsApi class. It’s one of those little gems that’s tucked away in PeopleBooks that I’d never noticed before.
It’s a method that lets you inject HTML into the REN Server window and it sounded like an ideal method of giving users feedback on the progress of their process/report. To give it a quick try I added some code to the PORTAL_CSS App Engine (in a play environment obviously, not anywhere important) and gave it a whirl.
The code I added all went into PORTAL_CSS.CREFPERM.Step1 and was as follows:
At the top:
import PT_PRCS:API:*;
After the functions (about half way down):
Local PT_PRCS:API:PrcsApi &api = create PT_PRCS:API:PrcsApi();
Then, wherever I wanted to update the user of the status, I added the following:
&strl_WindowMsg = &strl_WindowMsg | "<br />Step 1/5: Portal Security Sync starting. (" | DateTimeToLocalizedString(%Datetime, "HH:mm:ss") | ")";
&nret = &api.notifyToWindow(AEPORTALCSS_AET.PROCESS_INSTANCE, &strl_WindowMsg);
I placed my messages at reasonable points in the process and ran it. The resulting REN Window looked as follows:
I’ve only output static text to the window, but there are further possibilities. Chris mentioned that in the past he has inserted the last few lines of the log file. I’d be interested to hear from anyone with good ideas on how to use this.
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You could read rows straight from the message log and display them as they appear giving realtime process information to the user.
Hi,
really a neat trick…but somehow i wasn’t able to get it up and running…i came to a point where i figured out that the App Package PT_PRCS uses the following query “SELECT B.PRCSWINPOP, A.MCFREN_INT_URL,A.REN_CLUS_ROOT_PATH FROM PSMCFRENURLID A , PSPRCSQUE B WHERE A.ACTIVE_FLAG=’A’ AND A.MCFREN_URL_ID = B.MCFREN_URL_ID AND B.PRCSINSTANCE=:1” to retrieve the REN/MCF Url. However, for me it returned zero rows. I also had a look at few other demo/prod env and this query always returned no rows…i then hardcoded the values required to be passed to the function PublishToRen…still no luck… ne help would be appreciated…Thank you
Do you know if I can re-use the PIA SSL certificate in the REN server? I am not a PeopleSoft programmer. I deal with the certs. After I installed the certificate in the keystore; the REN function broke. I found where you can request a CSR and install a certificate for the REN server (in PeopleTools) but I can not find a way to import a certificate that matches the name of the environment. PIA, APP and REN are on same server (this is the dev environment). Thx
[…] within the REN Window July 20, 2009 Posted by Tipster in PeopleTools. trackback A while ago I showed how to output to the REN Window using PeopleCode while running processes through the Process Scheduler. A post I’ve been meaning to write […]