XPath with bad XML

My problems yesterday with the HTTP header got solved. I just needed to figure out the correct soapAction. After adding the soapAction of CreateTicket the other system accepted my webservice call and responded with a big chunk of XML. My next problem for today was to retrieve the ticket id from the other systems XML response.

I was expecting it to look like this:
<PrimaryTicketID>20120621:002</PrimaryTicketID>

But instead it looks like this:
<Result ID="20120621:002">
<PrimaryTicketID \>

How do pull out the attribute value using XPath? Actually it is not hard at all if you have done some XPath before, but as you remember I am totally new to this XML business. After trying different syntax and not getting anything out at all, I started to google for an answer. By mistake I started reading pages about XSLT and tried to get clues from there. After some time I actually managed to figure out how to do by comparing XSLT from an example web page and the XPath I was working with.

I just had to do:
Result/@ID

And got the result:
<result>20120621:002</result>

But for that to work I first had to edit the XML. With the original XML from the adapter response it still didn't work. Something seemed to be wrong with the XML format and no nodes could be filtered out.

I even tried:
//Result/attribute::ID

In the end I got a tip to ignore the nodes and just search for any attribute with the name "ID":
//@ID

Finally I got the result I needed even with the original XML.

I found some good information about XPath on W3Schools, but I really need to buy myself a book about XPath because this is really new to me.

My first BMC Atrium Orchestrator project

I am now working on my first BMC Atrium Orchestrator project. I went to the admin course a couple of months ago and didn't have the chance to do any real work with the product until now. It is quite fun and challenging because of the very tight time schedule.

I am supposed to integrate our BMC Remedy ITSM with a vendors system. First we are focusing in sending incidents over web-services back and forth. After this we will continue with changes and problems and later probably even service requests.

I have never worked with web-services before so there are a couple of things that I have to learn. Even working with XML is new for me but that shouldn't be too hard I guess, because orchestrator helps a lot in that area.

So far I have built orchestrator processes that query ARS for incident information, updates the incident with vendor ticket ID and relates work info and another incident to the original incident. I got some hints from some work that a consultant did for us so that saved me some time. Now I am struggling with the vendors system because it doesn't like the HTTP header I'm sending. Strange because it worked OK when I was doing the same to the mock service in soapUI.

WWRUG10

I am currently at the WWRUG10 conference in Las Vegas. The WWRUG (World Wide Remedy User Group) is a community gathering around the Remedy tools and applications provided by BMC. This is the first time I am attending the RUG and I hope to be able to attend again in the future. Two persons have attended all of the RUGS and several have attended ten times or more. My guess is that around a quarter of us are here for the first time ever.


One new "cool" thing presented was an iPad version of the SRM interface. Some think this is great and I just wonder, Why?. Who needs to order stuff from their iPad, if you have one? I would see a larger need to have an interface for incidents and tasks for technicians on the run. Then even iPad is a bit bulky and you would need access with your Android/iOS/webOS/whateverOS smart phone. Maybe I am just confused about this new iPad product? We will see in a short future what it will become.

I was hoping to post blog entries at least once a day when I am here but I don't have Internet access. Now I am able to borrow a computer with Internet access so I can post this entry. I will write something more when I get home again.

Work party - Midnight bath

Some of us took a bath in the pool. I didn't because I forgot my bathing suit. :P

Work party - Mosquitos

The sun is down but the mosquitoes are still up with us. This stuff is helping some but not much... Some more beer and we will not notice... Raj raj!

Work party - Raj raj

A couple of beers... and everything becomes much more fun! :D

Work summer party

Once a year in the beginning of the summer my customers boss is inviting us all to his home. There he and his wife are treating us with food and drinks. Good customer!

Project party - Burger

Free dinner is never wrong. :)

Project party - First beer

We are done with the BMC ITSM 7.6 upgrade project. It was a huge success so now we have to celebrate. This is the first beer at the local pub close to work.

Slackware 13.1 Released

http://slackware.com/announce/13.1.php

Windows Installer for SRM 7.6

I am just about to upgrade our BMC Service Request Management 2.2 patch 4 to SRM 7.6 patch 1. It should be a straight forward upgrade. I will install everything on the D-drive and I've deleted stuff so I have at least 2 GB free space. On the C-drive we have only the Windows operating system and we are not allowed to install anything else on the C-drive.

I start the installation but it halts before the actual installation starts with a message that I need to free up space on the C-drive for temporary 1500 MB data and it is only 1376 MB space available.

WTF! I have nothing to free up on the C-drive. Can't I use some network drive for temporary storage during the installation? Or use the 8GB memory that is mostly unused at the moment? Quite often I wish we were using Unix/Linux instead of this toy-OS called Windows.

See you later... now I have to call some Windows-tech to help me expand the C-drive or whatever they do.

After work beer

First beer! :D

New BMC Home Page?

Yesterday I and a couple of AR System consultants were talking about the ugly Home Page we have in our ARS ITSM 7.0 environment.

We have the standard out of the box stuff with links to the left and a huge empty blue void on the right side. I want to build something useful on that empty space but so far there have not been enough of a business need for that.

Then one of the consultants mention that he saw this new cool Home Page in arslist. So I dug down and found it. Yes it is cool and you can see it in the picture here. But as I understand it, this is nothing that you will get out of the box, this is an example of what you can build with the technology that BMC will release in mid 2010.


It looks cool but then the question for me will be... Will my company find a business need for me to let me build something like this for them? Probably not, because we are aiming really hard at buying more and more applications out of the box and not customizing anything. Everything should be configurable.

This is both good and bad...

Bad because I will not be developing as much as before.
Good because it will force me to change career.  ;)

E-mail support with humor

I am maintaining a BMC AR-System environment with ITSM applications supporting ITIL applications including Incident, Problem and Change. This system is sending out a lot of e-mail notifications to all the users. Quite often the end user reporting an incident answers the receipt e-mail asking questions or sending additional feedback. Very often the system just receives autoreplies about the users being on vacation or on paternity leave.

The autoreplies we don't care about but the questions and feedback can be interesting to pay attention to. I want to build some workflow to filter out the interesting stuff and attach to the relevant ticket in the system or automatically deal with them in some other way in the cases where it is not possible to find the corresponding ticket. So far I didn't get the permission to do this development.

Instead I was asked to set up an autoreply in the exchange account for every incoming e-mail that comes from within the company. In this autoreply we are just going to inform the end user that they've sent an e-mail to a system and no person will read the e-mail and that they should send the e-mail to some support address.

So I did, but I was a little bit concerned that Exchange was not smart enough to deal with the auto-replies from end users on vacation. If our system sends an e-mail to a user on vacation and and the users e-mail account sends an auto-reply to our system that send an auto-reply back to the user that sends an auto-reply again and so on... You get the picture. It will become like a ping pong match.

I sent an e-mail to our e-mail support group asking about the risk of an ping pong match. I really liked their answer.

"Usually Exchange is smart enough to not start a ping pong match that it can not win. But occasionally it can happen that they get excited and someone smashes in a backhand volley."

OK it didn't wipe away all of my concerns, but still I really like to see some humor at work. :)

Work Xmas party

Time for an Xmas party at my work. For as long as I have worked there I have never heard of such a party. So I went there to hang out with some of my colleagues.

It started around 17:00 but we came there after 17:30 and by then the whole corridor was packed with people eating, drinking and talking. It was a nice way to mingle with hundreds of known and unknown. Most of them were unknown to me, but if we had this a little more frequently then soon it would be a totally different thing. I believe this is good for the atmosphere at a workplace so I would like to see this maybe twice a year.

We were offered some small plate with different pieces of food. Not much at all so I wish they had some bread to fill the belly with. But there was candy here and there so I ate quite a lot of chocolate. With the food we had the option of beer, wine or water. I think I had at least five glasses of wine so I got a bit drunk, but at a party like this most people need to get a bit drunk to create the friendly atmosphere to get people to talk to each others.

During the evening a choir walked down the corridor and stopped here and there to sing some Xmas songs. They were quite good. Better than me at least... :P

The party was supposed to end at 19:00 and by that time they started to clear off all the food and drinks. Many of us were not ready to go home yet so we stayed and talked to after 20:00. By then most people were gone and my friends went downtown to keep the party going in some bar. I went home to my girlfriend to help her prepare for our guests from England that will come in the weekend.

I think it was fun and it was good to see people I work with in a relaxed situation. I really home we will do the same for next Xmas.

O'Learys

I am now at the Copenhagen airport in Denmark with Jimbo. We have been on a BMC CMDB Atrium 2.X Administration course. Now the week is over and we are on our way back to Sweden.

We have a couple of hours to kill at the airport so we are eating dinner and drinking a couple of beers at O'Learys. The burger was good but was not very warm when served. The beer was as usual very good. Soon we are done and will look for some present for our girlfriends.

What should we buy? What do girls like?

Fika at work

After lunch we had a department meeting. Halfway through the meeting we took a fika break with coffee and ice cream. I love ice cream! :D

Slackware 13.0

It has been out since the end of August but I just noticed it last week. I was used to be freshly updated about this distribution for many years. Every now and then I went in to the Slackware change log to see how far they progressed on the next release. I have been using Slackware since my first experience with Linux in 1994 when I installed it on my i486 PC. 15 years is a long time...

But now I have been using Ubuntu for half a year since my old server melted and I had to buy new hardware. So I didn't find as much interest in following the Slackware distribution in detail. It is a bit sad and I feel like a traitor, but I was so impressed by Ubuntu that I just had to try it. Ubuntu has been a lot of joy and a lot of ripped hair from my soon bald head (because I am used to the Slackware way), but that is another story.

Slackware write in the release anouncement "Probably the biggest change is the addition of an official 64-bit port." and that is so cool. Personally I think it is a little late considering that AMD came out with 64 bit processors ages ago. Other than that there is a load of new cool and improved stuff in the latest release and I am tempted to install it somewhere.

Why don't you download it and give it a try!

In the head of Emily

I just found out that one of my friends have a blog at IT24. Emily is writing about her work with processes, ITIL and all other things she stumble over at work. She is writing in Swedish so if you are able do decrypt the language you can read about what is In the head of a processor. Her posts are written in a smart and funny way and it is worth reading about every one of her trivial and highly interesting reflections.

Who are you, really?

The other day, during a coffee break, we were talking about natural neural programming in the brain of animals and humans. What do we have with us from birth programmed from our genes? Why is some animals ready to run just a couple of hours after being born and why is a human so helpless for several years. I find all of this quite interesting.

Our topic were evolving and transforming several times and somewhere in the discussion while talking about psychology I told about my experience with a personality test I made online a couple of years ago. The Jung Typology Test.

The test is usually referred to as a MBTI-test (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). At first I was a bit skeptical that this was some Internet joke or something, but something felt right and I made the test. It takes some time and then I am done and gets the result.

First it says nothing else than that I have the personality type of an INTJ. What the %¤&# is an INTJ? Well there are some links on the result page to some descriptions of the result. Like this one by Marina Margaret Heiss. More descriptions are made by Keirsey who talk about four temperaments where I belong to the rationals.

Do the test now!

The reason I can recommend this test to people is that it gave me an understanding of who I am. The description of an INTJ fits me very well and I recognize myself in it. I have read special INTJ-forums on the Internet where they discuss the special features we share that are both blessings and handicaps. All of which I too have, more or less.

Only 2% of the population are INTJ so many others might think we are odd and strange... but we are the masterminds and we rule the world! Hee hee hee... ;)