Tag Archives: softwareag

WebMethods Designer 8 – take 2

Well, it’s still pretty crap. Here’s some more things that are just wrong/stupid.

  • The navigation tree on the left helpfully scrolls to the current flow. Except that it actually scrolls so that the top of the folder containing the current flow is at the top of the tree view. So for a folder with (too) many flows, the current flow is actually off the bottom of the screen.
  • To see your currently locked elements, you need to scroll to the very top, right click the server and choose properties.
    Fine, except that you can’t double click on an entry to go to that flow, and the dialog is modal, so you have to keep opening and closing it to have a list of what’s locked. Or, take a damn screenshot.

Doesn’t matter whether I’m using the stock version, based on eclipse 3.4, or installed into a working eclipse 3.6.

WebMethods Designer 8 with eclipse 3.6

SoftwareAG’s webmethods designer 8, the eclipse based replacement for “Developer” comes packaged into a rather old version of eclipse, 3.4. if you’d rather use it with, say, 3.6, here’s what you need to do…

Install it as it likes, then open up c:\softwareAG\eclipse\updates. This is the goodness :)

Start up your eclipse 3.6, and under “help->install new software” choose “add” then “archive” and find first of all, the com.softwareag.common.zip and install it. The feature should install happily there.

But, to install the DeveloperPlugins.zip, you need to do a bit of hackery.

Inside the zip, open up features/com.softwareag.is.feature_8.1.0.0000-0193.jar, and then open up com.softwareag.is.feature_8.1.0.0000-0193.jar (your version may differ, but it should be much the same)
Then, open up feature.xml and you’ll see the following list of requirements:

   <requires>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.gef" version="3.4.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.wst" version="3.0.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst" version="3.0.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.platform" version="3.4.2" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
   </requires>

Unfortunately, org.eclipse.wst and org.eclipse.jst don’t exist anymore, they’ve been broken up into smaller pieces, and renamed.

Remove those two lines from the requires list, and replace them with this:

   <requires>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.gef" version="3.4.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.wst.ws_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst.web_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst.enterprise_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst.server_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.platform" version="3.4.2" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
   </requires>

Save your way all the way back out, and then use this zip as a software source as before, and the new feature should install just fine :)

You may not need all three jst.XXXX_core features, but this was enough to get it working for me.

oh, You’ll know you need this, if you get the following errors when you try and install from the original .zip files.


Ack, try and get back to the initial state where this didn't work to catch the whole error message to make googling easier.