Tips from Sony Thomas

CamStudio is a tool (open source) for recording screen activity into standard AVI video files (screen casting software). It also have the audio record feature. It can also used to convert AVIs into Flash Video format. Read more about screencast @  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast . You can download CamStudio from:   http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/    or   http://camstudio.org/  . I have uploaded a demo video, recorded using the Camstudio release 2.6. You could watch a high quality  video @ Youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-6aHFcuUM or you could find a video with low resolution below : CamStudio can be used to: Create movies used in user trainings Demonstrate features of a new software Track the progress of a program that executes for a long time Record the sequence of steps that cause the occurrence of bugs in a faulty software Record a movie stream  Convert AVI files to Flash (SWF)  files. You have different options in CamStudio as

To get an idea of the SearchEngineActivity logs, please read the blog :  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2012/01/atg-search-and-search-engine-activity.html Other than using the SearchEngineActivity logs, we could monitor the search engine request/reponse  by enabling the monitoring in the SearchEngineService component @ /dyn/admin/nucleus/atg/search/routing/SearchEngineService. Once you enable this "monitoringEnabled", each request/response and the response time like last response time and average response time can be found @ SearchEngineService component. After you send a request to the search engine, just refresh the SearchEngineService component and you could see that the total command count will be incremented by one and the response time also get updated. If you click this total command count, a new window will be opened with the request and response details.

Here I am going to explain how we can create a new ATG search project. It involves 3 steps --> Specify the general search project settings, Specify the content of search indexing and Build the index. Below I am elaborating the different steps involved with screen shots : 1. Go to Search Project Administration ui @  BCC and Click the button "New Search Project" to create a new search project. 2. Specify the search project name, give description and click the button "Create Search Project". 3. Click the button "Add Content" to add the search project content. 4. Specify the content name, select the content type and specify the IndexingOutputConfig path if the content type is ATG repository. Specify the remote host and port if you are using another server for fetching the content. 5. Click the content in the left side and expand the advanced option to specify the language and other customizations. 6. Click the

We could use the SearchEngineActivity log files to get the request/response to the search engine from a commerce instance. This folder is located in each commerce instance or the instances from which the call to the search engine is done. The SearchEngineActivity log file folder can be configured @ SearchEngineService component ( /dyn/admin/nucleus/atg/search/routing/SearchEngineService). To get the log files for the search engine calls, you need to specify the SearchEngineService.dumpingRequests as true. Then you need to specify the engineActivityPath as the folder in which you need the SearchEngineActivity logs. Below you could find my SearchEngineActivity log folder. Each successful call to the search engine from the commerce instance will create 5 files in the SearchEngineActivity folder : namely  request, response, search engineinfo, stack trace and response row . Each file name start with a specific sequence. You could see that the file name like "2630436491482_

Check out the O rder schema ER-Diagram @   http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/02/atg-order-schema-er-diagram.html Check out the User Profile  schema ER-Diagram @ http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.in/2012/03/atg-user-profile-schema-er-diagram.html If you would like to know the relationship between different Product Catalog tables, please find below screen shots of  Product Catalog schema ER Diagrams.

The call from the ATG commerce instance ( Estore instance ) to the search engine is done using the SOAP protocol. Read more about this architecture @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2011/11/atg-search-architectural-flow-search.html . If you have a SOAP UI tool (get it from @  http://www.soapui.org/ ), you could test the request/response from the search engine. You could find the wsdl for this SOAP in the folder in which your ATG search engine is installed. Below screen shot has the deatils of the wsdl : To call the search engine you need to know the port in which the search engine is running. You could get it from the SearchEngineService component of the commerce instance @ /dyn/admin/nucleus/atg/search/routing/SearchEngineService/.  Once you have these details, you could call the search engine with a sample request and a query string to get the response.

Here I would like to explain how your ATG search folder structure looks like after you do the ATG search installation and also about the search engine log files. To get the ATG search, you need to install the ATGSearch<version>Windows.exe after you do the ATG installation. When you install ATG search, the generated folders include an OS dependant folder. In the below screen shot, you could see the "i686-win32-vc71" folder and this is generated since the ATG search ins installed in a windows machine. The ATG search engine is actually an exe file inside this "i686-win32-vc71" folder. Below screen shot give you an idea about the "atgsearch.exe", which is the search engine application. This search engine application (atgsearch.exe) is started by a remote launcher call from the BCC search administration UI.  The log files like "atgsearch_20120106112413_568.log" are the search engine log files where you could see the engine

Following are the most useful set of windows shortcut keys that I would like to share with you. run commands calc        -->  Calculator  mspaint   -->  To get Paint textpad   -->  To get Textpad if installed cmd        -->  Opens a new Command Window (cmd.exe)  control    -->  Displays Control Panel  msconfig   -->  Configuration to edit startup files  compmgmt.msc  -->  Computer management  fsmgmt.msc      -->  Folder Sharing Management  services.msc     -->   System Services  appwiz.cpl  --> Add/Remove Programs  ncpa.cpl     -->  Network Connections  %userprofile%  -->  Opens you User's Profile  %temp%  -->  Opens temporary file Folder  temp        -->  Opens another temporary file Folder  cmd commands hostname   -->  Returns Computer's name  ipconfig /all   -->  Shows detailed information for all all network adapters netstat -a   -->  Displays all active network connections with port netstat -b

I am writing these quick reference blogs for those who wants to brushup the ideas of each topic. This one will lead you through the basic concepts of JAVA Servlets. How this quick reference guideline is different from the numerous other docs available ?  ,  please read on to get an idea : Servlet Lifecycle : The container will identify the servlet based on the URL Servlet class loading Servlet instantaition Call init method Create a servlet thread for the current request. Before calling service(), will create the request and response objects Call service method Service method will identify whether to call doGet or doPost and call it Call destroy method Different servlet objects : A sinlge servlet instance per JVM ( except for SingleTheadModel) A sinlge HttpSession per web application ( session activation and passivation) A sinlge ServletContext per JVM A sinlge ServletConfig per servlet A sinlge ServletRequest per servlet request Important Servlet rq and rs m