Start a Local Router (for development)

This topic describes how to start a local eProcess router on a development system. An eProcess router is a Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) communication bridge. You need not manually start a local router if an eProcess Router is running on either the Web WorkFlo server or the WorkFlo Services root server. In those cases, you can pass the host name, port number, and router name as part of the VWSession.logon() router_URL parameter. However, starting a local router enables you to observe the RMI communication between a development system and a workflow server more closely.

This procedure assumes you have already installed and configured the Java SDK to use the eProcess APIs. This procedure also assumes you are using the appropriate JDK (in the example shown, the Sun Microsystems JDK 1.3.1 on a Windows platform; for details on which JDK version to use and how to configure it for eProcess development, see Configure the Java SDK).

The following procedure uses the Panagon Task Manager to start a local router (treat all entries as case-sensitive):

  1. Open a command prompt and enter the following command to start the Task Manager (assumes for this example that pw.jar is in the process directory; modify for the JDK as appropriate):

C:\jdk1.3.1\bin\javaw.exe -classpath C:\process\pw.jar filenet.vw.apps.taskman.VWTaskApplication

  1. When the Task Manager window displays, click Start.
  2. In the router dialog box, enter a name for the local instance of the router; for example, myrouter.
  3. Enter the name of the server running Web WorkFlo Services. For example, if the name of the server running WorkFlo services is "hq-workflo", enter hq-workflo.
  4. Enter a valid WorkFlo Services user name. (When running the samples, you should use an WorkFlo Services administrative user.)
  5. Enter the password for the specified user.
  6. Enter an isolated region number for the isolated region you are using for development. (This number can be from 1 to 999 but the number should correspond to an initialized isolated region. Although it is possible to do so, you should not run the samples (or other eProcess applications in development) in an isolated region already used for either production or other development.
  7. Click OK.

Once the message appears stating that the local router has started, you can use it to communicate with a workflow server.

Tip On Windows 98/NT/2000 systems, you can create a short-cut to launch the eProcess Task Manager. In the short-cut properties dialog box, enter the command shown in Step 1 (above) in the target field. Specify the directory containing the API samples as the start directory. (Specifying the directory containing the API samples, creates and updates the router trace files in that directory, which can be useful for debugging when you start modifying the sample code.)

The first time you attempt to connect to a session, a vwapi.txt file will be created in the root directory of the disk on which the application is being run. The file contains a complete list of all session transactions handled by the router. If you don't start the router, the vwapi.txt file continues to grow rapidly (as duplicate error messages are appended to it) until you terminate the sample application.