Jan 062014
 

The information dissemination and exchange for many our clients is very important and should be up-to-date. This is the reason why many of them are using Web publishing features and sharing Web based reports of their MagicDraw projects in the Intranet (i.e. within the organization), Extranet (between the organization and its business partners), or even the Internet itself.
MagicDraw has a solution to generate Web based reports automatically: Web report can be scheduled to be generated directly from Teamwork server and published to the company’s web server which serves as an up-to-date Knowledge center.

This post will demonstrate to you how to guarantee permanent, low-cost availability of the MagicDraw projects via Web.

The Solution

In the image below there is a typical solution deployed on the same server where MagicDraw Teamwork server is installed.

Solution for Automatic Web Publishing

Solution for Automatic Web Publishing

What you need before starting the automatic web report configuration:

  • MagicDraw Teamwork Server –all collaborative projects of the organization are stored here.
  • MagicDraw client for opening and generating web reports from Teamwork Server.
    NOTE: All the resources used in Teamwork Server projects (e.g. profiles, custom diagrams, custom reports) should be installed in MagicDraw client.
  • Web Server for sharing generated Web reports. Which Web server and which machine you will use is up to you. Most important is that MagicDraw Client is able to write generated files into a specific Web server directory.

How to Create Automatic Report Generation?

After the infrastructure for the automatic web report publishing is ready as described in the previous section you can follow these steps to create scheduled task and properties for the Teamwork project to be generated:

1. Open the report wizard folder in the MagicDraw installation path, e.g. C:\Program Files\MagicDraw\plugins\com.nomagic.magicdraw.reportwizard
2. Create  the project.properties file

Sample project properties file to download

project.properties file

NOTE

Automatic publishing requires administrator level teamwork account or this user should at a minimum have access to all projects needed for report generation. Do not use this account for anything else.

3. Create the new scheduled task (from Control Panel open Scheduled Tasks).

Scheduled Task

Run*: “C:\Program Files\MagicDraw\plugins\com.nomagic.magicdraw.reportwizard\generate.bat” -properties project.properties
Start in*: “C:\Program Files\MagicDraw\plugins\com.nomagic.magicdraw.reportwizard”

* Values for this field depend on the MagicDraw installation path

4.  Set the schedule for new created Scheduled task.
We recommend to running tasks during non-working time. If there are multiple scheduled tasks running at the same time, only one will execute, since all the reports are running with the same user account and MagicDraw allows only one login per user account.Scheduled tasks should be set with approximately 10 minute differences.

Testing

  1. Run the scheduled task from the context menu (right click on the task and Run).
  2. Go to the output folder defined in the project.properties and verify the generation of the report files.

Debugging

If you want to check (debug the intermediate results during the report generation, run the Report Wizard manually.

  1. Open the Scheduled Task to details of Run field, e.g. “C:\Program Files\MagicDraw\plugins\com.nomagic.magicdraw.reportwizard\generate.bat”properties project.properties
  2. Open the Command Prompt window (Start -> Run -> type cmd)
  3. Go to the report wizard folder (copy/paste in Command Prompt: cd C:\Program Files\MagicDraw\plugins\com.nomagic.magicdraw.reportwizard\)
  4. Run the report generator (copy/paste in Command Prompt: generate.bat”properties project.properties)
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