One of the tasks that nearly every System or Business Administrator will need to do for their site is to define the lifecycles to be used for managing objects and their corresponding release schemes.

When defining your lifecycles, there are many pre-defined states to choose from, however there may be a state you would like to use that is not in the list yet. In the next generation of Pro/INTRALINK, this list is generated from a set of values in a Resource Bundle. A resource bundle is an enumerated type, which in Java parlance is a type whose legal values consist of a fixed set of constants. Our task is to simply add a new constant to the existing list using the Enumerated Type Customization Utility (more later).

Now you may be asking yourself, “This is supposed to be an Install blog, why is he talking about Business Administration tasks?”

The reason why is there is an easily overlooked option that needs to be selected during installation so that the necessary files are installed and available for editing. The option is called Enable Displayed Text Tailoring and if it isn’t picked, you can search all day for the files mentioned in the Business Administrators guide and you won’t find them in your system.

It’s easy to miss because when you are running the installer for the Pro/INTRALINK CD (MED-509NT-CD-080), the option is available only under the Custom installation and not Typical. If you pick the Custom option (on the Select Installation Type screen), the next screen (Select Product Options) should present you with the option for selecting it.

If you are going through an install for the first time, you will probably want to have all three options selected:

• Install Pro/INTRALINK Software
• Enable Displayed Text Tailoring
• Add Servlet Authentication Rules for Apache

If you have already completed your installation and realized that you need to go back and add the resource bundle files, just re-run the installer for this CD and deselect all options except for, Enable Displayed Text Tailoring

• Install Pro/INTRALINK Software
• Enable Displayed Text Tailoring
• Add Servlet Authentication Rules for Apache.

The installer will then add only the additional files needed for text tailoring without affecting the rest of your installation.

To add or edit values of an enumerated type, use the enumCustomize command. This utility should be used rather than directly editing resource info files and it can be found in the <Windchill loadpoint>\bin directory. Also, it should be started from a Windchill Shell so the environment variables are properly set when it runs.

One note of caution though. When you add a value to an enumerated type, removing that value can result in a runtime error if there are objects that have been created in the database that use that value.

Do not remove a value from a resource bundle unless you are certain there isn’t a reference to it!

The safe way is to just make sure the Selectable option is not picked for that value. It won’t be visible in the UI anymore and will still be available for objects that are already in the database that use it.

To see the changes you have made after using the utility, perform the following steps:

1. Restart the method server.

2. Rebuild all of the client jar files so clients can access the new values.

3. Restart any Java clients. (HTML clients access the new values as soon as their pages are refreshed from the server.

If you have any questions or comments on this blog, please post a thread in the Install forum. I will respond as soon as I can.

Wally McGuire

Sr Windchill Specialist