TIBCO iProcess Interview Questions

What is TIBCO?

Tibco is an organization which provides Integration software to software industry.

What are the different modes of service invocation in TIBCO?

Services can be invoked in several ways.A one-way operation is executed once and does not wait for a response.

A request-response oriented operation, in which client needs to wait the response. In a request-response service,communication flows in both directions

What type of resources in TIBCO EAR file?

Following type of resources are typically added in EAR file in TIBCO:

Local Project Resources (Processes, Schemas, Connections, Services, Variables etc)

Library Builder Resources Files.

Files referred in designer CLASSPATH

Files under Designer Installation directory

What is vcrepo.dat and when this file is created in TIBCO?

Vcrepo.dat file is used to store certain properties like TIBCO RV encoding, display name; description etc. vcrepo.dat file gets created automatically when a TIBCO BW project is saved for the first time. This file can be used for identification purposes.

While debugging TIBCO BW processes, which activity can be used to write complete schema information to a file?

TIBCO provides Inspector activity which can be used for debugging purposes while developing applications in TIBCO designer. Inspector activity can be used to write all output information of designer activities to a local file including process variables and other details.

How Restful web services can be developed in TIBCO?

TIBCO provides a Plugin for REST and JSON which can be used to develop Restful web services in TIBCO designer.

Can we have backward transitions in TIBCO BW Processes?

In TIBCO Designer Processes, transitions between activities are always unidirectional. This means that we can’t go back to a previous transition from any point.

What are different Panels of TIBCO designer window and what is the purpose of each?

There are following four types of panels available in TIBCO designer window:

Project Panel: This panel shows project hierarchy.

Design Panel: This panel is used to design new BW Processes in TIBCO.

Palette Panel: This Panel has all the available Palettes with bundled activities which can be dragged and used in design panel during process development.

Configuration Panel: Configurations including input, output details for any activity are specified in the configuration panel.

What are the three levels of validations that can be performed in TIBCO designer?

Following are the three levels of validations supported by TIBCO BW:

Activity level validation

Process level validation

Project level validation

What are the TIBCO BW activities that can participate in transactions?

There are some specific TIBCO BW activities are supported in transaction not all.

JDBC activities

EJB activities

JMS activities

Active Enterprise Adapter activities that use JMS transports

TIBCO iProcess BusinessWorks Connector activities

How to do exception handling in Iprocess for EAI steps?

We can achieve exception handling Using the SW_QRETRYCOUNT , Please see the below explanation

Using the SW_QRETRYCOUNT system field to provide exception Handling for Transaction with Failing EAI Steps .

The SW_QRETRYCOUNT System field returns the number of times that a message in a message queue has failed.

The field value is 0 the first time a message is processed and is incremented each time the message fails.

For Example , If a BG process is processing a message and SW_QRETRYCOUNT=2, this means that the BG is attempting to process the message for the third time.

What is the role of TRA?

TRA stands for TIBCO Runtime Agent.

The TRA has two main functions:

Supplies an agent that is running in the background on each machine.

The agent is responsible for starting and stopping processes that run on a machine according to the deployment information.

The agent monitors the machine. That information is then visible via TIBCO Administrator.

Supplies the run-time environment, that is, all shared libraries including third-party libraries.

If you have installed a particular version of TIBCO software e.g. TIBCO BW X.Y.Z, What are X, Y and Z number stands for?

Integration can be at different application layers:

X:Patch

Y:Major

Z:Minor

What are the revision control system options available in TIBCO designer?

File sharing

VSS

Perforce

XML Canon

ClearCase

iPlanet

CVS

PVCS

What are the different types of Transactions TIBCO provides?

TIBCO BusinessWorks offers a variety of types of transactions that can be used in different situations. You can use the type of transaction that suits the needs of your integration project. When you create a transaction group, you must specify the type of transaction. TIBCO BusinessWorks supports the following types of transactions:

JDBC

Java Transaction API (JTA) UserTransaction

XA Transaction

What are the encodings supported by designer ?

Encodings supported by designer are

ISO8859-1(Latin-1)

UTF-8

What are the 4 main panels of the Designer window ?

The 4 main panels of the Designer window are

Project panel

Palette panel

Design panel

Configuration panel

Explain the process configuration parameters – Max Jobs, Flow Limit & Activation Limit ?

Max Jobs: Max Jobs specifies the number of process instances that are kept in memory. Once this limit is reached newly created process instances (subject to flow limit) are paged out to disk.0 specifies no limit and is the default.

Flow Limit: Flow Limit specifies the maximum number of running process instances that are spawned before the process starter is suspended ie it enters a FLOW_CONTROLLED state and does not accept new events. This can be used to control the number of process instances running simultaneously and when the protocol generating the event can store the event till it is received, like email servers, JMS, RV etc. 0 specifies no limit and is the default.

Activation Limit: Activation limit flag specifies that once a process instance is loaded it must be placed in memory till it completes execution. By default it is enabled.

What is difference between fault tolerant and Load balanced deployment in TIBCO?

Load balancing: Load balancing is done between two or more servers where the load is distributed between servers to avoid any server crashes due to heavy load on a single server.

Fault tolerance: Fault tolerance is achieved between two servers where one server acts as a primary and the second server acts as a secondary/backup server for the primary server. Whenever failure occurs for primary server, the backup secondary server becomes the primary server.

What are the options for configuring storage for process engine’s checkpoint repository ?

The options for configuring storage for process engine’s checkpoint repository are:

Local File: Information is stored in a local file which in case of engine crash/failure and same information is used to resume the process flow once engine is up. This mechanism works only in case of single server or load balancing approach.

Database: Information is stored in a database table which is used to resume engine later.  Fault tolerant engines can recover from a checkpoint only when database is used.

Where is it possible to change the priority of a workitem while it is in a work queue?

SW_IP_xxx system field values

What happens when an Event is used to interrupt a case and the Event step is NOT linked to any other steps?

Case data changes will be imported, but the case will NOT be moved along the process.

Case data changes will be imported, and the audit trail will be updated to record the Event trigger.

What is short lock and long lock in tibco iProcess?

Short lock. This is the standard lock normally set by the TIBCO iProcess Workspace. A short lock is removed when a user keeps or releases a work item. In the event that short locks are left behind because, for example, the iProcess Workspace crashed, the only way to remove the short lock is to re-start the iProcess Engine or use the following command.

Long lock. A lock that is persistent and can only be removed using sal_llock_frm_init() by the user holding the lock. Long locks are not normally used by TIBCO iProcess Workspace, but may be set by SAL SDK programs or the TIBCO iProcess Objects Client. Re-starting the iProcess Engine has no effect on long locks, so a work item locked in this way remains inaccessible to every iProcess user until it is manually unlocked.

What is the difference between iProcess Server Objects and iProcess Objects server?

Client applications make use of the objects in the TIBCO iProcess Server Objects by making method calls that either retrieve or modify data. These method calls cause messages to be sent to a TIBCO iProcess Objects Server. The TIBCO iProcess Objects Server acts as a gateway between the client applications created with TIBCO iProcess Server Objects, and the TIBCO iProcess Engine, where the actual processing and storage of data occurs. The TIBCO iProcess Engine manages all data, routing work items and updating the appropriate work queues.

Server Objects communicate with the TIBCO iProcess Objects Server via TCP/IP. Objects Server communicate with the TIBCO iProcess Engine via UDP

What are the modes of TIBCO BW Installations ?

GUI mode

Console mode

Silent mode

What activities are supported in JTA Transaction?

The Java Transaction API (JTA) UserTransaction type allows:

JDBC

JMS

Active Enterprise Adapter (using JMS transports)

EJB activities

What are the different acknowledgment modes for a message?

There are 6 modes of acknowledgement. They are –

Auto – message is acknowledged automatically

Client – use confirm activity for acknowledgement

TIBCO EMS Explicit – use confirm activity for acknowledgement, only available for TIBCO EMS

TIBCO EMS no ack

Dups ok – message is acknowledged automatically on its receipt

Transactional – when a transaction is included in a process definition. The message is ack when the transaction commits.

What is prefetch and failsafe?

Prefetch is fetching the messages from the server before receiver calls. Failsafe property enables to write persistence messages to the file with synchronous i/o calls.

How do you send a response from a web service?

We write to output to the queue from which we received the request.

What is the difference between soap event source and service palette?

Soap event source is used for single operation, single end. Service palette is used for multiple operations, multiple end bindings like http, jms.

What activities are supported in XA Transaction ?

The XA Transaction type allows:

JDBC activities

ActiveEnterprise Adapter activities that use the JMS transport

JMS activities

to participate in transactions.

Note:For JMS activities and ActiveEnterprise Adapter activities, request/reply operations cannot participate in an XA transaction. Also, EJB activities cannot participate in an XA Transaction group.

What is the main difference between iProcess Server Objects and iProcess Objects server?

Client applications make use of the objects in the TIBCO iProcess Server Objects by making method calls that either  retrieve or modify data. These method calls cause messages to be sent to a TIBCO iProcess Objects Server. The TIBCO  iProcess Objects Server acts as a gateway between the client applications created with TIBCO iProcess Server Objects, and the TIBCO iProcess Engine, where the actual processing and storage of data occurs. The TIBCO iProcess Engine manages all data, routing work items and updating the appropriate work queues. Server Objects communicate with the TIBCO iProcess Objects Server via TCP/IP .Objects Server communicate with the TIBCO iProcess Engine via UDP.

Explain What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

BPM is an automation of processes that exists in an organisation.There are challeges that can be more efficiently handled through different technologies using BPM. Ex: webMethods technology(using Designer). Through BPM an organisation can Monitor its working efficiency in rendering services to the customers. Identify the areas that needs to be modified/improvise easily address the problem areas.

What is event PreProcessor and why it is used?

Event PreProcessor is basically a Rule Function. This rule function is used to process the incoming messages before they are converted into Events.

What is the scope of user defined process variables ?

The scope of user defined process variables is only the process in which it is defined.(Not even inside a sub process that is invoked from this process)

What is difference between shared variable and job shared variable ?

Both of them can be manipulated via the palette resources ‘Get shared variable’ and ‘Set shared variable’.

A job shared variable is private to one instance of job or in other words each job has a fresh copy. In the case of shared variable the same copy is shared across all job instances. It can even be persisted and can survive BW engine restarts and even shared across multiple BW engines(when deployed using DB persistence).

How do wait-notify resources work ?

Basically wait and notify should share a common notification configuration which is just a schema definition for data that will be passed from notifier to waiter. Specific instances of waiter & notifier are corrrelated via a key.

For example: when one process is in wait state for key ‘Order-1’, it waits till another process issues a notification with the same key value.

What are the output formats for XSLT?

XML

HTML

Text

What is the Purpose of $_error variable ?

$_error variable is available in the node following the error transition. It captures the error message, error code etc.

What are the cases where business process cant proceed correctly subsequent to restart from a checkpoint ?

Sending HTTP response, confirming an email/jms message etc. This is because the confirmation or sending HTTP response has to done in the same session. When engine crashes these sessions are closed at their socket level. In such cases send response/confirm before checkpoint.

What are the TIBCO BW activities that can participate in transactions?

Not all TIBCO BusinessWorks activities can participate in a transaction. Only the following types of activities have transactional capabilities:

JDBC activities

JMS activities

ActiveEnterprise Adapter activities that use JMS transports

EJB activities

TIBCO iProcess BusinessWorks Connector activities

What are the different types of Transactions TIBCO provides?

TIBCO BusinessWorks offers a variety of types of transactions that can be used in different situations. You can use the type of transaction that suits the needs of your integration project. When you create a transaction group, you must specify the type of transaction.

TIBCO BusinessWorks supports the following types of transactions:

JDBC

Java Transaction API (JTA) UserTransaction

XA Transaction