Studio tips and tricks for BusinessWorks 6.X and BusinessWorks Container Edition

Emmanuel Marchiset
5 min readAug 28, 2022

--

This new article is to share some useful and not always known Studio tips and tricks.

If you know others tricks that you think are worth sharing please let me know and I will add them.

Moving back to the previous tab

Many people coming from BusinessWorks 5.X are missing the ‘Back’ button available in Designer.

Back Button in BusinessWorks 5.X Designer

This is not well known but it is available also in BusinessWorks 6.X in the button bar below the Eclipse menu.

Back Button in Studio

The ‘Forward’ button is also available in the same way.

Closing a tab

You can easily close a tab, close all tabs but the selected one or close all tabs by just doing a right click on a tab and selecting the option you want to use :

Closing a tab in Studio

Note that closing a resource and re-reopening is equivalent to do a refresh for that specific resource and is sometime useful to resolve editing problems.

Fixing all Mapper Type Casting error in one go

This can be done by clicking on the button below:

Fix Type Casting Error Button in the Mapper

Undo recent changes

Recent changes in Mapping and configurations can be undone using the following menu option :

Undo menu in Studio

It is possible also to ‘re do’ changes.

You cannot ‘Undo’ previous changes after a ‘Save’.

Clear console

It is possible to clear the Eclipse console output by doing a right click and selecting the Clear option :

Clear Console Output in Studio

Cleaning a workspace at Studio start-up

In rare cases it might become difficult to work on a workspace and even closing and restarting Studio won’t solve the issue.

In such cases it can be useful to start Studio from the command line with the
‘- clean’ option:

Starting Studio with the -clean option

Searching for functions in the Mapper

In the mapper it is possible to search for functions using the ‘Filter’ field.

In the example below we are looking for functions available to handle the hexadecimal format and filtering on the ‘hex’ string :

Searching for functions available to handle hexadecimal format

How to switch logs to DEBUG level quickly

This can be done using the following approach:

. Display the Debug Configurations panel using the Run -> Debug Configuration menu
. In the panel open the ‘Advanced’ tab
. Change the logging Configuration field value to use the logback_leveldebug.xml file :

Advanced tab of the BusinessWorks Debug Configuration

How to increase the size of the Eclipse Console

. Use the Window -> Preferences menu to display the Preferences panel

. Then go the Run/Debug -> Console section

. Increase the value of the Console Buffer Size:

Updating the Eclipse console buffer size

. Click Apply and OK

How to write to Eclipse Console output to a file

. Use the Run -> Debug Configurations menu to display the Debug Configurations panel

. Then go the ‘Common’ tab, Check the File option in the ‘Standard Input and Output’ section, enter a file name and apply :

Filter Problems for the current application or project

Select the ‘Problems’ tab and click on the ‘Filter’ icon :

Problems tab and Filter icon

The following panel is displayed:

Problems filter panel

To display only problems for the application, or the project, you are working on check the ‘Errors/Warnings on Project’ option and make sure the scope is set to ‘On elements in selected projects’.

Filtering on the selected applications or projects

After applying this selection when you select a resource of an application, like a Process or a Schema, the ‘Problems’ tab only displays problems of the selected application.

In the example below you only see the problems of the TestMapping application because the Process ‘Process1’ of the application is selected:

Problems for the TestMapping application

It is possible to do the same at ‘Selection’ level (a package or a specific element, for example a group of Processes from a given package, a Process or a Schema) using the ‘Errors/Warning on Selection’ option and the ‘On selected Element on its children’ scope.

Filtering on the current selection

Limiting Studio slow downs

While using Studio it happens sometimes to experience slow downs that last for a few seconds and even more in some cases.

Most of the time this is related to a Java Garbage Collection happening and the behaviour can be improved by updated Studio configuration.

This can be done with the following:

. Go to the <TIBCO_HOME>\studio\4.0\eclipse directory

. Edit the TIBCOBusinessStudio.ini file with the following:

- Change the Garbage Collector from ParallelGC to G1GC by replacing the following line
-XX:+UseParallelGC
with the following
-XX:+UseG1GC

- Increase the Max Heap Size by editing the following line

-Xmx2048m
with the following
-Xmx4096m

Example of an updated TIBCOBusinessStudio.ini file

You may also refer to this more detailed article:

https://medium.com/@emarchiset/how-to-improve-the-businessworks-studio-user-experience-78d02701d71c

--

--

Emmanuel Marchiset
Emmanuel Marchiset

Written by Emmanuel Marchiset

I work as an Architect at TIBCO Software on Integration products. Opinions here are my own.