Intalio Designer and BPMS work nicely and smoothly.
Nevertheless, when it does not perform as expected, it is better to document it. I consider important to illustrate our experiences in this blog, and allow you to save time.
Yesterday one of my colleagues experienced a strange behavior with Intalio Designer… once again.
Problem #1
A few months ago, he could not even launch the Intalio infrastructure. No message was shown… how to deal with this? Well, the intalio forums gave him the solution: Intalio is compatible with JDK version 1.5 not with 1.6. This information appears in the correct place, but he was a bit too anxious to read all the information before installing. Please check the warning here.
Problem #2
The beast that challenged us yesterday is something different. The designer does not interpret the WSDL files as web services on the “Explorer Tab”…!!!
However, the same WSDL file appears OK on the Layout Tab… and you can even go through the Bindings, the Ports, the services…
When dragging and dropping the WSDL file into a pool, Designer asked whether implementations or invocations were required. Pretty much the normal behavior, but it did it for ALL the services, not for only one. I had to erase all the bad ones. The good one could not be correctly attached to a task via messages, because some problem blew out the translation to BPEL.
My colleague had already reinstalled several times during the last two months, obtaining each time some strange behavior from Designer. The only common element after each installation was that each time he found a number of projects already mapped in the Explorer Tab.
I was back in the city, so I could share his sufferings and give him a piece of my ignorance. He develops Java applications using Eclipse… (mmmhh)… The views that are normal in Eclipse appeared at the upper right corner of the IDE…(???)… something that does not happen in my environment.
A short diagnostic test showed that Intalio had mapped the workspace onto the same directory.
The solution? Just change the workspace (File->Switch Workspace) to a new directory, and relaunch Intalio Designer.
After importing the whole project from the old workspace (File->Import), everything worked correctly: I could finally drag and drop the services from the WSDL description.
The funny thing is that my colleague was the one who proposed the solution. Being a consultant, I have to ask the good questions; most solutions are IN you.
Hey! Do not try to import single elements of the project… it won’t work.
In general, you can trust Intalio forums for finding answers to many problems I’ll expose here. My goal is to follow a conversational style and give you contextual information from my experience; this is my grain of sand to the community. Nevertheless, Intalio Forums are THE reference. Please take into account that Intalio is actually two or more platforms and a philosophy of integration for the WHOLE enterprise. Thus, complexity is built in the forums. I hope this blog makes Intalio easier to understand to non-specialists.
