WebFOCUS Newsletter February 2003 - New Multiserver Support in Managed Reporting WebFOCUS 5

There is a major architectural enhancement built into WebFOCUS Release 5 that will open up a world of possibilities for Managed Reporting. For the first time, multiple WebFOCUS Reporting Servers are supported from within one MR session.

This is truly a big deal and took a lot of development effort to implement. There is now nothing stopping Managed Reporting from supporting a scalable, enterprise solution for reporting.

Some perspective might be helpful here. Previously, in WebFOCUS Version 4, Release 3.x when you logged into MR you were authenticated against a single server and were locked to that server for the duration of your session.

That meant you could not access data simultaneously from MVS and Windows NT or UNIX unless you had set up complex hub-sub configurations, which is intended for supporting cross-platform JOINs, not for administering and developing. We also saw customers train their users to log out of MR in order to pick a different server and then log back in again to work around the limitation. The problem was continuously having go in and out of MR. It is easy to see why users would get frustrated.

Now a single MR session can keep track of your credentials for multiple servers. From the user perspective, there is no longer any indication of where the data is coming from unless you tell them. Multiple server support is easy for developers also, as a result of enhanced GUI support, documentation, and Best Practices tips.

Setting Up Multiple Servers

Setting up multiple servers is a WebFOCUS Administrator task. Using the new WebFOCUS Console (machine/ibi_html/wfconsole.htm) you can configure node blocks that point to your various Servers. After entering the node name and type (see Screen 1) you are presented with a GUI that guides you through the other settings, such as port, host, and description.

Screen 1

You may also set up Alternate Deferred Server relationships from the console (see Screen 2). For example, it is common to direct interactive report processing to servers with a high level of resources to finish the reports quickly. However, it may be desirable to direct deferred processing to a different server with fewer resources since the user’s Web browser is not "waiting" on the request. Now you have the option of configuring an alternate server for deferred processing for each of your interactive servers.

Screen 2

Note: WebFOCUS 5 also has new settings that can help you support both interactive and deferred requests on a single server (except MVS). Be sure to evaluate these different approaches before making a decision. See the MR Development and Administration Manual, Chapter 19, for more information.

Lastly, for each server you have the option of using the console to configure a client node profile for the purpose of setting server-specific WebFOCUS defaults. You do this on the Reporting Servers | Remote panel. For example, you may use these profiles to set different values of IBI_REPORT_USER and IBI_REPORT_PASS for each server.

Creating and Managing Server Resources

Now that you have set up some servers, MR Administrators and MR Domain Administrators can work with them in the Data Servers feature.

Data Servers is available from both the Developer Studio and the Web-based Java applet environments. From here you may access, edit and create server files on all your Release 5 servers regardless of whether they are APP ENABLEd or configured with the traditional Cataloged Path (EDAPATH) behavior. You may also create new applications without having to leave Managed Reporting (see Screen 3).

Screen 3

Under each application you will find the FOCUS procedures, metadata, HTMLFORM files, GIF images, FOCUS data files, etc. Depending on their type, you may create, edit, delete and even copy and paste these files among your server applications. For example, you may copy a GIF image from a Windows NT server application to your MVS server to test it in the heading of a PDF report. What’s nice about this is that even if you don’t know the vi or ISPF editors, you may create and manage files on the Unix and OS/390 (MVS) operating systems from MR.

Domain Admins require the Data Server privilege in order to access the Data Servers feature and all developers require proper credentials to read/write files to the server.

Dynamic WebFOCUS Server Signon

Now in MR, whenever you access a server and valid credentials are required but not found, you will be prompted for them rather than receive an error (see Screen 4). This feature is activated by default with the WF_AUTOSIGNON=yes setting in cgivars.wfs.

Screen 4

Depending on where the signon is triggered, you will be prompted by either an applet dialog or an HTML window. In either case, the credentials are validated and stored in the WF_COOKIE for the duration of your session. While implementing this, we decoupled the MR and WebFOCUS signon actions so that you may now log on to MR even if your servers are not running. More specific error messages are now returned to the user when there are problems with the server such as "server not running" and "server busy."

Using Multiple Servers

In the MR Domains area, you may now set a Server property on your domains, standard reports, and reporting objects. For example, you might want to set all your requests in the sales domain to go to the node NTCLUST, but one specific report may need to go to UNIXSRV and therefore its setting will override that set at the domain level. Learn more about this in the MR Development and Administration Manual, Chapter 2.

Best Practices

Working with multiple servers certainly makes it easier to integrate all of an enterprise’s data into one MR application. But it also makes it easier to establish development, test and production environments.

Be sure to check out the updated Best Practices documents on techsupport.ibi.com/bestpractices for more information.