Info engine based Reports/customization

[PreetiGupta]

Hi,

We have been evaluating to re-do various JSP reports we have developed for change management into info engine/Cognos reports. I personally have not tried my hand in this technology in my 9+ year in Windchill world 🙂

We would like to know how many of you are using Info engine for various reports/customization purposes. As this is PTC proprietary technology how many customers are there who really have used it without issues. How many resources have you allocated? In my mind there may be hundreds of people who know Java/JSP/SQLs etc but there may be handful of people who are expert in Info Engine technology.

I look forward to hear your opinion.


Preeti Gupta
Sr Engineer(Windchill Specialist)

15800 Alton Pkwy, Irvine,92618 USA
T +1 949-727-7516

[cid:image001.gif@01CCCEB2.F62BD4F0]

[JeffStevenson]

Hi Preeti,

I've redently begun using IE and I find it to be useful. It takes a bit of trial and error to learn how it is intended to work, but once you're over the learning curve, I've found it an easy way to access some of the basic tasks within Windchill. You can also use the IE API to extend it's capabilities. It provides a nice way to access the data within the CMS.

Depending on how many reports you have, I don't think it would take more than one person to maintain your reports. Someone with a mix of SQL and JSP/web experience would probably be a good fit.

[RivanHassanali]

Hi Preeti,

We're using Info*Engine for many of our integrations, some are lightweight just pulling information and others are heavier allowing creation of data. I find it very useful and not very difficult to use or understand. The toughest part we have with it is there isnt really a debugging tool, so there is alot of old-school debugging techniques to be used with it when developing.

You can mix InfoEngine and java in the same task, switching between the two.

We're using it more and more for streamlining business actions. For example, a simple webpage to trigger the task allows our user to create a Change Notice within 5 clicks (instead of 40 using Windchill 8 native). The InfoEngine tasks can be accessed by url also, or registered for SOAP. (we tend to access by url for most of these lightweight apps).

Hope that helps,

Rivan

[Nitin]

While usingInfo*Engine for reports, the only problem you might face is you will be getting xml format output, and you will have to work on it to make it more user friendly. That said I*E tasks are much easier to use because of their predefined format, easier than APIs, and so retrieving data will not be a big task.

Club Form output with I*E and you get good UI along witheasy data retrieval.

Hope this helps.

-Nitin

[shudh]

I would rather think that the XML output is a strong benefit! You can write
Transformers on top of that and render them in various polymorphs ( think
transformation for mobility, or Apache FoP, or change to Excel
understandable rich XML, not talking about csv/tsv based poor men's excel
reports ).

Having said that I would always prefer Java API..

More abstraction gives less granular control on my objects..

Not object oriented by nature..might encourage new developers to write
procedural behemoths

Lack of Tooling ..

Performance ??? ( Did not profile two approaches with sufficient load so
cannot comment) but could be slower..

Best Regards
Shudh

——--------
Written on Droid