Perpetuating Propagation Perplexity

The WLP 10.3.2 documentation: Propagation Inventory Compatibility states

WebLogic Portal inventories saved with WebLogic Portal 8.1 or 9.2 cannot be used with WebLogic Portal 10.3.2 propagation tools.

While this implies that a 10.2 inventory can be used, it does not specifically say so.  This came up for someone I know who then asked support if one could propagate from a 10.2 environment to a 10.3.2 environment since they wanted to build out a new, clean infrastructure for their upgraded WLP application rather than running an upgrade in the old production environment. The response was quick and short: "No".

So, being the way I am, I tried it anyway. Works fine. Granted, there are probably many legitimate reasons for not doing this, and I would never suggest it for on-going operations, but as a one-shot move from an existing environment to a new environment it is definitely worth a test run before changing your upgrade strategy.

Resurrecting the WLP Data Sync Web Application in 10.3.2

In WLP 10.3.2, the datasync web application has been deprecated. This makes sense if you consider the recommended approach is to test all of your Datasync Project work in DEV mode and then propagate up once you have everything the way you want. However, if you are upgrading or have a development process where this is not the easiest policy to implement, you may wish to bring back the datasync.war. If that is you, fear not! Blogging to the rescue!

While in previous versions of WLP it was automatically added to a portal EAR project, in 10.3.2 you must manually add the dataync.war.

The documented  approach (How To Import and Add the Deprecated 'Datasync.war' to the WebLogic Portal Application (Doc ID 1268447.1)) to add it is to use OEPE, right-click on the EAR project, select Import War, and import [WLP_HOME]\p13n\deprecated\lib\datasync.war. Doing so creates a datasync project in your workspace.

The documentation goes on to describe an edit to the MANIFEST.MF to include the classes from ImportedClasses on the classpath. When I tried it, I could get to the data sync application index page, but would get a 500 error past that.

Digging through the logs, I found class not found exceptions. I eventually fixed this by moving the jsp folder under/datasync/ImportedClasses/WEB-INF/classes/com/bea/p13n/management/data to /datasync/ImportedClasses/com/bea/p13n/management/data, re-building and re-deploying.

Running Two WLS Domains with Pointbase

I hope this guy's blog lasts forever so I don't have to manually write the steps to run two WLS domains using Pointbase on the same machine: http://www.jroller.com/gmazza/entry/reconfiguring_pointbase_databases_on_weblogic.

You would think that you could plan ahead and simply change the values for DBMS and Port on the Configure JDBC Data Sources screen, but the "wizard" still spits out config files using the default 9093 port for Pointbase.

My alternative approach is to search for .cmd, .properties, and .xml files containing "9093" and change it to "9094" for the second domain. Not as step-by-stepish, but easy to remember :)