Getting to Know Property Manager in iWay 9.2

[Joseph Vogel]

iWay Integration Tools (IIT) enables users to design and implement simple to complex integration patterns.  Components of these implementations often share similar properties whose values may change over time or when deployed within different environments such as a development, test or production deployment. The challenge then becomes how to manage these properties in organized predictable manner. This usability challenge is clearly evident when designing flows within IIT's flow editor. IIT's flow editor comes equipped with a tool named Property Manager. Its main objective is to allow users to define variables which then will appear throughout the editor when assigning a value to a component property. When a user wishes to change the value of the property they do that in property manager and all components referencing that variable inherit the new value.

 

Lets take a look at this in action. 

Here we have a flow named, simpleflow opened up in IIT's flow editor. This flow will use the File Connectors, "copy a file" action to copy a file from a source to  target directory.  

 

 

Now we could just type in the paths into the connectors source and target properties, but what if these paths were used often in a more complex flow. What if in the future these paths changed ? To make our lives easier  lets just create a couple of variables utilizing Property Manager.

 

 

As  users who know about "Property Manager" as of 9.2 this functionality is now embedded into the flow editors' canvas as shown above. We have created a sourceFile and targetFile variable. IIT now makes this variable available for assignment as shown below.

 

 

By selecting the $sourceFile variable IIT will use its value and assign it to the "File Name" property of the File Connector.  We do the same for the Target File Name as shown below 

 

 

When the flow is compiled... the compiler substitutes the values of these variables into the flow. Where ever a design time variable is used noted by the "$" sign the compiler will do the appropriate substitution. All variables are created and maintained in a single view make management a snap. If the values of these variable change you only have one place to perform the edit.

For advanced users you might want to create a variable in property manager which evaluates to a runtime variable.  In that case.. the evaluation will occur based on the running environment. In our use case above the file paths most likely won't be known until the application is deployed in a runtime environment.

The many uses of runtime variables and how they are set will be covered in another topic.