WebSphere MQ FTE & WSRR – SupportPac FA01 (v1.0)

WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition is a product that I work on, at it’s basic level it allows users to transfer files from A to B using WebSphere MQ as the transport. Maybe another day I’ll blog about it, but you can read some more information here. WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) is a product developed at IBM Hursley labs, and fits into the Governance space of applications (at least in my eyes, please correct me if wrong!). It does many many things, read here for more information. The part I am particularly interested in is the developing of custom models and relationships to store user defined information, in this case WMQ File Transfer Edition objects and MQ Queue Managers. This is what the SupportPac FA01 does.

SupportPac FA01 supplies an OWL file, which defines Agent, Queue Manager and MQ Connection objects and the relationships (Agent -> MQConnection <- Queue Manager) which allows us to model an FTE network inside WSRR. The SupportPac uses the WSRR Service Discovery Framework and the scheduler to keep the information current and up to date. Information on developing your own custom Service Discovery services can be found here.

Once data is in WSRR it allows users to query FTE objects, and perform transfers based on their own rules and requirements. Using the WSRR Rest API users can easily develop web or clientside applications that can exploit the FTE network information.

The SupportPac contains all the information required to install and configure the Service Discovery plugin, however in a later post I plan to put the information here for everyone to see.

MS0T (Standalone MQ Explorer) & WebSphere MQ FTE

Recently IBM announced a SupportPac for WebSphere MQ for the Eclipse based WMQ Explorer. Called MS0T it is classified as a category 3 SupportPac and can be downloaded from the MS0T page.

One outcome of this Standalone edition of the WMQ Explorer is that you now no longer need to use the full WebSphere MQ installer and can just have the Explorer without the other parts of the product. This is pretty neat when you also want to administer your WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition network on a remote machine without a full install. As of writing this post WMQ FTE does not support automatic installation of the File Transfer Plugin for the MQ Explorer and manual steps are required, and there are no plans to do so at present. Here are the manual steps required to make this work:

1. Install SupportPac MS0T (currently Windows only, support for Linux coming soon!)
2. Install the tools edition of WMQ FTE on the same machine as your Standalone Explorer is installed
3. Create a file called com.ibm.wmqfte.link in the Standalone Explorer eclipse/links folder that contains the following path=c:/your/wmqfte/tools/install/location
4. Start Explorer and you should see the familiar (if you have used it before) File Transfer Edition icons on the left hand side!

Please note: The slashes in the above property are forward slashes and must be forward slashes for this to work!

Let me know if you manage to get this working, or if not what went wrong!

Update: There is an official technote describing this exact scenario (written by using this post) http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21394643. Thanks to Marcel Amrein for pointing this out.