In the past, I’ve gone and de-constructed WebSphere Process Server stack traces in an example of problem determination. Now, I’ll talk about what I do when WebSphere Integration Developer goes crazy.
A typical WebSphere Integration Developer exception consists of either a builder error pop up dialog or an issue when trying to open an editor. You’ll see the standard eclipse error dialog with some cryptic message. When this happens to me, I try the following steps:
Regenerate the J2EE App, EJB and Web projects
Sometimes there is an error in these generated artifacts. What I first do is a clean build via the build menu, clean all. This is supposed to flush the internal state of the eclipse builders and force them to recreate all artifacts from scratch. As the versions have progressed, this has gotten better but it’s not perfect.
Should the problem continue, I will switch to the resources view and manually delete these generated projects. Once they’re gone, I will do a clean-build. Since the files are physically deleted, theres no worry about the builders maintaining internal state.
Restarting WID
Sometimes, all it takes is a simple restarting of the tool and builder errors can disappear.
New Workspace
In WID v6.0.2.3 I rarely do this anymore. I would export my current workspace as a Project Interchange file (IBM speak for a .zip file). Then I would start a new workspace and import the PI. This resolves issues with corrupted workspaces that ravaged the v6.0 GM version of the tool.
Usually, these two solutions will resolve random errors. Sometimes though, your tool is completely screwed up and you can’t even get the Business Integration Perspective to appear. This usually occurs after the first time the product is installed or when a fix pack (or add-on product like WebSphere Business Services Fabric) is installed. There are two methods of fixing these kinds of errors:
WID.EXE -clean
There is a command line option when you start WID called ‘clean’. To explain clean, we need to take a step back and understand how WID is package. WID is built on top of both eclipse and Rational Application Developer. It does this by providing a set of plug-ins that extend the eclipse platform. Eclipse then needs to index these plug-ins to determine dependencies and capabilities. Sometimes, the eclipse index is out of sync with the file system. Clean forces eclipse to rebuild this index. It will take about 5-10 minutes to start the tool as this work is performed but it will usually resolve missing editors.
WID.EXE -initialize
This is another internal eclipse command line option that tells the platform to rebuild that the plug-in caches. I normally do a clean followed by an initialize.
Finally, if neither of these solutions resolve your problem, you can take a look at the WID .log file and see the exception. The log file is contained at <workspace_location>/.metadata/.log . If you are very lucky, it may contain relevant data.
So you now know my WID secrets on fixing tooling time errors. I hope it will save you some time in the future.
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