Defining custom launch configurations

In many cases, you may want to create custom launch configurations, for example to run your applications with a subset of the monitors in your project or if your application relies on an IAF adapter. Note that the Apama Workbench perspective is targeted at creation of simple applications and so does not provide much support for projects with multiple launch configurations. If you need the power of multiple launch configurations, use the Apama Developer perspective.

When you create a new shared custom launch configuration, two files are created and are placed in the directory specified by Shared file. The names of these files have the following format and the launch configuration information is split between them:

Any changes you make to the launch configuration will be reflected in the .deploy file. However, if you export a launch configuration to an Ant deployment script and then the shared location changes, then you must re-export the launch configuration to a new Ant deployment script. If you do not, the old Ant deployment script fails because it cannot find the .deploy file.

1. In the Project Explorer view, select the project you want.

2. Do one of the following:

If you are using the Apama Developer perspective, select Run > Run Configurations from the menu. The Create, manage, and run configurations wizard starts. The wizard has four tabs, the Apama Project tab, the Components tab, the Environment tab, and the Common tab.

If you are using the Apama Workbench perspective, select the project of interest in the Workbench Project view and then click the Edit button just above the Start, Stop, and Restart buttons in the launch control panel. This allows the default launch configuration for the project to be edited. Creating multiple launch configurations is not recommended for Workbench perspective users.

3. In the wizard's Name field, assign a name to the launch configuration.

4. On the Apama Project tab, fill in the following information:

Open Dashboard Viewer during launch — Specifies whether or not the Dashboard Viewer should be launched when running the project. The default is to run the Dashboard Viewer.

Use default dashboard — The default dashboard is the dashboard project in the dashboards directory of the project. You can launch another dashboard by disabling the default dashboard and specifying the project relative path of the dashboard to launch.

5. The Components tab lists the components that are needed by the project such as additional correlators or external processes. You can add and remove components, edit their specifications, change the order in which they are started, or specify connections between correlators. Components are started in the order in which they appear in the Components tab from top to bottom. However, there is no waiting for one component to finish its startup before the next component is started. In other words, you cannot depend on startup for one component to already be complete when a subsequent component is started.

Add — Adds a correlator or an external process to the launch configuration. To add a component, click the Add button and select the type of component you want to add.

Connections — Displays the Connections dialog, which lets you add and remove connections between correlators. See Connecting correlators .

6. The Environment tab lists any additional environment variables needed to run any of the processes started by this launch configuration.

Apama recommends that you append new environment settings to the native environment as otherwise it will be necessary to manually specify the standard Apama environment variables in order for the process to start correctly.

Note that to add a suffix or prefix to an existing environment variable, a new environment variable of that name should be created, and the existing value specified as part of the variable's value, for example, PATH=${env_var:PATH};C:\my path.

7. The Common tab specifies additional attributes for running this launch configuration.

Shared file — This is the default selection and the default path is the config\launch folder in your project directory. Click Browse to navigate to and select another location that is available to all users sharing this project.

When Shared file is selected, two launch configuration files are created and placed in the directory specified by Shared file. The names of these files have the following format and the launch configuration information is split between them:

Any changes you make to the launch configuration will be reflected in the .deploy file. However, if you export a launch configuration to an Ant deployment script and then the shared location changes then you must re-export the launch configuration to a new Ant deployment script. If you do not, the old Ant deployment script fails because it cannot find the .deploy file.

Display in favorites menu — Select the appropriate checkbox to display this configuration as a choice in the drop-down menu of the Debug or Run button in the toolbar.

Console encoding — The default encoding for output to the console is Cp1252. To encode console output in a different format, click Other and select the encoding you want. For example, UTF-8.

Allocate console (necessary for input) — For correlator launch configurations, there are no reasons not to allocate a console. Allocating a console does not affect performance.

File — If you want to capture correlator output in a file, navigate to and select a file to contain the correlator output.

Append — When you capture correlator output in a file, indicate whether you want to append the output to the specifies file.