Customizing log4j in Sterling OMS

Introduction:

Logging is very important part of any application. It helps you detect issues and provide more information for triaging. IBM Sterling OMS application uses log4j utility for logging. The log4j utility writes trace and debug information to a log file.

As per your business requirements, you can modify the logging parameters in the log4j configuration file to control the location and level of the log files. You might want to send Application/Agent/Integration server logs to different locations. You might also have Custom java classes with loggers to capture the logs.

In this post, we will see how we can customize log4j as per our requirements.

How to create a custom view to join multiple tables in Sterling OMS

 Introduction:

There can be a business requirement to fetch data from different tables from database and use it for further processing. For example - In Inventory console, we need to search and display data from extended attributes of yfs_item.

We can either write a custom logic to fetch the data from required tables and then do post processing to return the output in desired format. There is also a possibility to join required tables in a View. Latter one also requires customization but can be better performing.

Views can be created for out-of-the-tables and/or custom tables. Let's see how we can create custom views in IBM Sterling OMS.

Enable Product Browsing in Sterling Web Call Center

Introduction:

IBM Sterling has introduced Web Call Center known as Commerce Call Center (CCC) with version 9.3 onwards. It is a Thin-Client application. Prior to v9.3, RCP-based COM was used which is a Thick-Client application. So the process of build, deployment and promoting new changes to environment has become easy as it eliminates the need for installing and maintaining a client application on desktop systems.

When a customer calls the call center user asking product details which he/she intend to buy, In such situations user must be able to browse products and view the details. For that, Product browsing (Catalog Search Indexing) should have been enabled for users to search and browse products.

In this blog, we will learn how to enable Product browsing (Catalog Search Indexing) for IBM Sterling Web Call Center. I have taken reference of Sterling OMS v9.5 to explain steps.

How to create JMS Queue in WebSphere

 Introduction:

There are many instance when your Application requires JMS connectivity. If you are using WebSphere application server then along with deploying your application, you can also use out of the box JMS feature available with WebSphere. You don't need to look for any other external JMS provider.

In this post we will be using Web Sphere Application Server v8.0.0.0 console to create point-to-point queues. We will see the configuration of:

- Bus

- Destination

- Queue Connection Factory

- Queue

Sterling and JBoss - JMS and Transaction Timeout configuration

Introduction: 

There are a lot of considerable differences in JBoss 5 compared to JBoss 4 and don’t expect existing configuration to work seamless when migrating from JBoss 4x to 5x.

While working in IBM Sterling, if you are using JBoss as Application server and as JMS provider then this might be helpful for you to see the configuration files in JBoss and how to configure it in Sterling.

In this post, I will be talking about JMS and Transaction Timeout settings in JBoss 4x vs 5x.

Exposing REST Services in Sterling OMS

Introduction:

Prior to IBM Sterling OMS v9.4, it was only possible to expose APIs/Services as SOAP web service. REST API features are enabled now with standard installs and updates of IBM Sterling OMS v9.4 onwards.

XML API (XAPI) capabilities are now accessible through a simple REST API layer. Developers can create, read, update, and delete resources by using HTTP calls that are compliant with REST standards.

Both SOAP and REST have their own Pros and Cons. But here we will just focus on basics of enabling REST services with examples.