What do you wish you had learned sooner about Integrity?

[byoung]

My role in my company is changing soon. I've prepared a lot of documentation for newer users, but was wondering if you in the community have additional ideas?

What would you say are  2-3 most useful things you learned LATE about Integrity-- that is, what do you wish you had understood earlier? For example, my list would include:

1- How to multi-edit a list of items

2- How relationship fields are set-up, and how they work

3- How Export puts priority on local vs. server configuration files and templates

4- How to configure email alerts for myself on the Web interface

etc.

Anything *you* would put on the list?

Bob

[KaelLizak]

1. How seat licenses work, compared to how float licenses do.
2. How gateway export works, especially with respect to local vs. server configurations (I think this is your #3).
3. How to set up notification rules for myself.
   1. When the emailAdvanced trigger should be used instead.
4. Why it is so useful for authentication realms to be LDAP + MKS domain, why the order they are used in matters, and why if LDAP is first and down, you can't authenticate against MKS domain.
5. How to use the API & the Trigger API to best effect.
6. How to use PSM to see under the covers before issues come up.

Regards,

Kael

[nborrerojr.]

1. How shared items in the document model work.
2. What the limitations of the default Test Result item are.

[VolkerEckardt]

I'd like to add:

1. When to reuse relationship fields, when to avoid and rather creating a new one. => Advantages, Disadvantages, Best Practice

2. When renaming fields, how to find out that all related "places" where renamed properly. And how this rename affects any other area exactly. (e.g. affected Type properties, affected metrics, affected trigger)

3. How to test Integrity admin changes properly => Test Plan for Admin changes

4. Integrity Admin Documentation => how to document an Integrity setup in a way that the documentation can act also as a change tracking list => with minimal effort

5. ALM Solution: understand the MKS Solution properties much better => what they are for, when to change, how to extend

6. Presentation templates => well structured, without overloaded tabs, well sorted, best practice

[KaelLizak]

Hi Volker Eckardt‌,

I was wondering if you could elaborate on "1. When to reuse relationship fields, when to avoid and rather creating a new one. => Advantages, Disadvantages, Best Practice"?

Thanks,

Kael

[smccoy]

Heres my list of things I wish that I understood much earlier...

1) The complexities and limitations of the document model and "shared items", and the contrasting simplicity of "flat item" types.

2) The power and flexibility of the Web Interface over the thick client tool.

3) The limitation that FVAs (or what would be the equivalent to a join to look-up other fields based on related keys within Oracle or SQL server) can only hop 1 relationship.

4) The features that go away with many-to-many relationshpis - IBPLs and FVAs for example.

5) The "double-delta" bean problem with trigger scripts that update items with circular references (in order words, items in a cyclic graph).

6) To create an 'Initialize Item" script for every item type to perform all of the initialization and verification that cannot be provided by the engine.

7) To avoid constraints unless they are necessary - like for filtering out items from an IBPL.

😎 That I would be copying data a lot and learning to have to break the rules of "normalized data".

9) That you cannot disable history for fields, which is a huge problem when lots of data is calculated in scripts and stored.

10) How to layout a presentation template that will render in some predictable fashion on screens with varying resolutions.

11) That Integrity's user-login process puts userid and password information over the wire in human-readable format.

12) That running everything under SSL causes several unfriendly side-effects.

13) The multi-staging server environment has issues with how image locations are managed in presentation templates. Why there isn't a parameter with the host path with the images containing a relative path is a major p.i.t.a. frustration.

14) How to properly perform a query within a script and extract the result.

15) That the scripting engine is a very-old version of Rhino (a guess) which doesn't support a lot of the latest scripting best practices - now JSON support, for example.

16) That we can inject our own HTML and CSS into Rich Content longtext fields for better formatting of the UI.  I believe that this only works on the Web Client for certain. Some things can work on the thick client but there are limitations.

17) How to read and navigate the Javascript API documentation.

18) To get PSM installed and running earlier, and to have been trained on PSM.

That's a start, anyway.

-Sean