Install user-defined extensions that you have developed yourself, or have acquired from other software vendors, with the minimum of user intervention.
Complete the following tasks:
You must install user-defined extensions on all appropriate broker computers, and, if the extension is a user-defined node, on the workbench computers (user-defined parsers have no workbench component). Components can be installed separately, or as part of one process. The components can be on different systems, therefore check that the installations are completed on all affected systems.
If
an extension writes messages to user trace, you must update the environment
variable MQSI_CONSOLE_NLSPATH (Windows® systems),
or NLSPATH (all other systems), so that the mqsiformatlog command can find
the message catalog.
Before installing a user-defined node, check the version of the Message Brokers Toolkit to which you are installing, because a specific version of the toolkit could be a prerequisite of the user-defined extension, or it might require specific files to run.
To determine the version, see Detecting installed versions of WebSphere Message Broker.
If the product is shell-sharing with another product, the installation path is determined by the first Rational® program that was installed. To determine the location of the Message Brokers Toolkit installation, look at the cdi_ref.properties file which is set up by Rational. This file is installed by the Message Brokers Toolkit and by Rational Version 6.x products; the first time one of these products is installed the file is created. It is shared by all subsequent installations. If all Message Brokers Toolkit and Rational Version 6.x products are uninstalled, the file is removed when the last product is uninstalled.
To set up Message Brokers Toolkit with icons and options for a new user-defined node, set up a new Eclipse link file that points to the directory containing the Eclipse plug-in files. The link file must contain one line which specifies the full path of the target directory. When you create the Eclipse link file, place it in <c.wb.b_wb.location>/eclipse/links/.
Copy the compressed file that you created in Packaging a user-defined node workbench project to the directory identified by your link file. Extract the contents into that directory. For example:
The file named opt/ibm/MessageBrokerToolkit/6.0/eclipse/links/Myextension.link might
contain the line path=/opt/My/Extension/Nodes/eclipse/plugins/your_node_name.
The directory pointed to by the path variable must contain the contents
of the compressed file that you created earlier when you packaged
the project.
When you have installed the extension, restart the target workbench with the -clean option. You can do this from the command line, or by modifying the menu shortcut. You should use the -clean option whenever any changes are made to user-defined extensions, to make sure the changes are picked up by the message flow node palette. When the workbench has restarted, the new category of nodes appears on the palette of the flow editor.
If you are an experienced Eclipse user or plug-in developer, you might want to use more advanced Eclipse functions to handle additional products like user-defined extensions. For example, you can package user-defined extensions as Eclipse features, instead of plug-ins.
Features have several advantages:
For a full description of these and other advanced Eclipse options, see the PDE Guide which includes a section about creating features. You might also find useful the description of the feature manifest in "Navigating and customizing the workbench".
You might need to detect the version of the runtime components that are installed, to ensure that the correct LIL file is loaded by the correct level of the broker. See Detecting installed versions of WebSphere Message Broker.
To add .jar or .lil files to runtime installations on WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker Version 5.0 or later, and WebSphere Message Broker Version 6.0 and later, see Installing user-defined extension runtime files on a broker. For Version 2 brokers, add the user-defined extension files to install_dir/lil/, and restart the broker.
You cannot use the -l parameter to modify the user LILPATH for 64-bit extensions. Instead, append the directory containing the directory that holds the extension files to the environment variable MQSI_LILPATH64, as described in the following section.
See the mqsicreatebroker and mqsichangebroker commands for further
information.
You can make this change by creating a custom environment script in the working directory:
You can give the environment script any name, but the file extension must be .cmd on Windows and .sh on all other platforms. The script can perform all the operations of a shell script, but you should limit the scope to only appending the following variables:
This example shows the environment profile for MyExtension
on Windows, which is installed
in C:\Program Files\MyExtensions.
The script is called MyExtension.cmd and is stored in the working directory. The default location is %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\IBM\MQSI\common\profiles. where the default setting for the environment variable %ALLUSERSPROFILE% is C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\.
The Windows script contains the following content:
REM Added by MyExtension install, do not modify set MQSI_LILPATH=%MQSI_LILPATH%;"C:\Program Files\MyExtension\bin"
This example shows the environment profile for MyExtension
on Linux, which is installed
in /opt/MyExtension. The script is called MyExtension.sh and
is stored in the working directory /var/mqsi/common/profiles/.
The Linux script contains the following content:
#!/bin/ksh # Added by MyExtension install, do not modify export MQSI_LILPATH=/opt/MyExtension/lil${MQSI_LILPATH:+":"${MQSI_LILPATH}}
You can test the following variables in the profile script, for example if you want to ensure that a user-defined extension runs only on a specific version of the broker: