Installing or Upgrading OSLC Connect for Windchill

These procedures extend Windchill so that the Windchill user is presented with additional Windchill User Interface elements that expose controls and forms for the consumption of OSLC information from configured OSLC Providers. The procedures also manually configure Windchill with new properties to store relationships with chosen OSLC Providers.

Procedure

Prepare installation files on the Windchill server

1. Confirm that Windchill itself is installed and is operational.
   • Visit a URL like http://windchill.acme.com/Windchill/app in a web browser.
2. Log into the Windchill server as an Administrator and as a Windchill Administrator
   • use a terminal session that supports graphic display (e.g. native desktop hardware, RDP, VNC, or X Window tunneling)
3. Browse to the installation directory of PTC Windchill
   • For Windows, this resembles: C:\ptc\Windchill_11.0
   • For Linux, this resembles: /opt/ptc/Windchill_11.0/
4. Run Windchill Shell with command bin/windchill shell
5. Copy the windchill_resources_Javax or windchill_resources_Jakarta zip file to a temporary staging directory, for example /tmp/sodius_install
6. Create a dedicated installation folder for each OSLC Connect for Windchill release and unzip the Windchill resources Zip file inside it.
7. A default property file named extension.properties is at the same level as the unzipped files.
   This property file contains default value of needed properties for extension to install.
   The needed properties are the identifier of database, the path to the Windchill install and the url of OSLC Connect for Windchill.
   You must change the values by editing the file extension.properties.
   • property wt.db.type is the type of the database: oracle for Oracle, or sqlserver for SQL Server
   • property wt.install.dir is the path to the root directory of Windchill install (example : C:\\ptc\\Windchill_11.0)
   • property windchill.contextPath is the context path inside the Windchill URL. (example : value Windchill for URL https://windchill.mycompany.com/Windchill)
   • property wt.apache.httpServer is the apache configuration directory path (example: C:\\ptc\\Windchill_11.0\\HTTPServer\\conf\\conf.d). If this property is not set, the install script will use the default directory [WT_HOME]\\..\\HTTPServer\\conf\\conf.d.
   If you a have a version of OSLC Connect for Windchill already installed, you can copy the values from the extension.properties file located inside the previous version installation folder.
8. Stop the Windchill service

Launch the extension installation script

1. If you a have a version of OSLC Connect for Windchill already installed, make sure you un-install it. In this case the installation script will prevent you from continuing.
2. Run the Ant script to install the OSLC Connect for Windchill Extension
   • ant -f extensionInstall.xml, if installing the extension on a monolithic Windchill or a Windchill cluster master node
   • ant -f extensionInstall.xml slave, if installing the extension on a Windchill cluster slave node
3. The Ant script asks input arguments in addition to file extension.properties.
   • property db-password is the password matching the Windchill user, property [wt.pom.dbUser] configured in wt.home/Windchill/db/db.properties
4. Wait for the script to:
   • copy files to the installed Windchill directories
   • copy the config file that exposes the /oslc-connect url to Windchill Apache HTTPServer conf folder
   • update the Windchill SQL database with the new tables
   • run the Windchill xconfmanager properties propagation task
   • run the Windchill Javascript Fragment re-combination task
5. Carefully monitor execution of the script and capture any failure messages
6. As the extension contains custom Windchill action models, the extension script merges custom Windchill action models into Windchill custom-actionModels.xml file. If after the installation You experience issues with Windchill action models into Windchill action models, follow the procedure in Resolve OSLC Connect action model conflicts.
7. As the extension contains a configuration file for the Apache HTTPServer, be aware that the Ant script won't install the file if the Apache HTTPServer is not on the same machine as Windchill. In that case this file must be deployed manually. See the Check the deployment of the OSLC Connect for Windchill Extension page to locate the destination folder.
8. If your Windchill instance is running on IIS, the installation process has two differences:
   • Make sure your IIS instance has the module URL Rewriter installed
   • As stated in the last paragraph (Giving IIS Users Appropriate Permissions) of Windchill IIS installation guide you must restore the access rights of the IIS user to [Windchill_Home]/tomcat/connectors/conf/workers.properties and [Windchill_Home]/tomcat/connectors/conf/uriworkermap.properties

When the script runs successfully, this completes deployment of the extension.

Restart Windchill

1. Start the Windchill service, and restart the Apache HTTPServer or IIS Server
2. If you had a web browser open with the previous version of the extension before the installation, close all active browser sessions, or clear the browser cache.

File inventory

The list of files that have been copied or deleted are exported in two files that can be found in the installation folder: resources_inventory.txt and resources_uninstalled.txt.

Note that the files windchill-all.js and windchill-all-debug.js are compiled by Windchill. If you are only un-installing and you need to update another server using that file list, then you would have to copy those two files after the un-installation is done, and paste them on the target server to restore them in their original state.

Installation on a cluster

When using a Windchill cluster installation, there are 2 options:

• You are using a file synchronization tool, such as Robocopy (Windows) or rsync (Linux). In that case, you only have to perform the installation on the master node.
• Otherwise, the whole procedure needs to be repeated on each individual cluster node. The only difference is that, as detailed in the steps above, the installation script must be called with the slave argument on cluster slave nodes. This will allow the installation to run faster, as some operations only need to be performed on the master node.

Troubleshooting

^[1] If IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management global configurations or IBM Jazz Reporting Service / IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Engineering Insights (ENI) are being used by any Windchill product administrator, advise the IBM Link Index Provider (LDX) and IBM Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE) administrators to verify the Windchill datasources and to re-index in the case an error status was reported after the upgrading. This is a very important task in order to keep synchronizing those applications with Windchill. On Reindexing an LDX/LQE datasource topic, LDX/LQE administrators can find a guide to do it.