Spotfire Scheduled Updates

This tutorial provides you with the opportunity to practice working with the Scheduled Updates feature in TIBCO Spotfire and this part of the TIBCO SPOTFIRE ADMINISTRATOR activities.

To establish Scheduled Updates, perform the following tasks:

1. Create a User account for the Scheduled Updates User.
2. Configure the Web Player Server to perform scheduled updates.
3. Schedule the update in the Spotfire Web Player.
4. Configure the KeepAlive service so IIS does not shut down the web application.

1. Create a User Account:

Spotfire Professional has a group that requires no license assignments to fulfill its role. This is the group Scheduled Updates Users. This Group is specific to, and used by, the Web Player Server. The sole User belonging to this group operates similarly to a service account. Obviously, this User also needs permissions to all folders containing artifacts pertinent to the scheduled analyses. Let’s add our “service-account-type” User here.

Also, we can designate the User as a member of the Web Player Administrator group so that user has access to the analyses to schedule.

1. Open SPOTFIRE PROFESSIONAL, and in the Administration Manager, add the new user with a name such as “sfscheduler”.
2. From the Groups and Licenses tab, select Scheduled Updates Users from the Available groups and click the Properties tab.
3. Click Edit Members and display all users.
4. Select sfscheduler and add this user to the group.
5. Repeat this process to add sfscheduler to Web Player Administrator group. (This group addition is necessary to give the user rights to the appropriate library items.)

2. Configure the Web Player Server

• The Web Player Server contains configuration settings (in the file Web.config), specifying this special user name and password, along with a couple of other settings, which the Web Player Server then uses to actually update any analyses that are scheduled to run. Let’s open the Web.config file and make sure our service-account-type user is specified appropriately.
• In your Web Player Server installation, in the webroot directory, open the file Web.config in a text editor. For example:
• Find the settings for the Schedule Updates and Keep Alive service and make sure they are enabled

 

 

• Find the settings “ScheduledUpdatesUsername” and “ScheduledUpdatesPassword”
• Provide the matching sfscheduler credentials in the tag, as follows:

• Save and close the Web.config file..
• Note: If you are the server administrator, you can encrypt this section so the password is not displayed as clear text. Refer to the documentation for instructions.
• Stop and restart IIS to reload the changed Web.config. (From the Start menu, click Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, and in the Manager tool, select your server, and then click Restart.

3. Schedule an Update

• Open a browser and log into the Web Player as Administrator

• You’ll see the Scheduled Updates option in the upper right corner:
• Click this option, and then click Add Analysis File.
• Browse and select a file.
• In the Configure Update Schedule dialog, set the options, and then click Save.
• To test, you can set the trigger for an update in this dialog. Then, click Diagnostics in the upper right corner, and in the click the Scheduled Updates tab.

If your Scheduled Updates fails, this view displays an error.

You can click the Web Server Log tab and review the messages in that view for more information and clues as to why the scheduled updates are not working.

4. Configure the KeepAlive Service

Because IIS will shut down the web application if no connection is made within 20 minutes, you must configure the KeepAlive service to ensure the Scheduled Updates can run.

1. Browse to your Web Player Server installation’s webrootbinTools directory and find the file Spotfire.Dxp.Web.KeepAlive.exe.config.
2. Depending on the type of authentication you have set up, you must also set up access parameters. Locate the section for WindowsUserName and WindowsPassword sections, and substitute a legitimate username and password (being sure you specify domain as well as the username.)

3.Save the file and start the KeepAlive Service from the Administrative Tools > Services dialog.