Overview#
Novell DirXML Designer
#
A Faster, Easier Way
Novell's Identity Manager team has developed the Designer for Identity Manager, a powerful, graphical toolset designed to assist in configuring and deploying Identity Manager.
Things to Set#
Things to set when you install Designer
Update Isolated Designer#
We have worked on site where there was no Internet connection to provide updates and we needed to Update Isolated DesignerThis was done in 2008 and things have changed since then. The concepts are still the same, but the Zip file and other information is old stuff.
Designer (Eclipese) Plugins We Like#
Using Apache Directory Studio LDIF Editor to Open LDIF Files in Designer
Apache LDAP Studio#
You can add Apache LDAP Studio to Designer by Unzipping the LDAPStudioSetup.zip
file to the ..\Designer\eclipse directory. Remember this is old information. You can follow the idea, but use new files.
Eclipse SQL Explorer#
The project started as a fork from the original JFaceDb project which has gone commercial and uses some of the core libraries of SQuirreL SQL.
Great add-in that lets you browse SQL and execute SQL calls from in Eclipse. Remember this is old information. You can follow the idea, but use new files.
JNDI Browser#
Allows browsing several different contexts out-of-the box. We found this really useful to browse the NIS information direct from an NIS server.
All in one Zip File#
All three of the plug-ins on this page in one ZIP file that can be extracted into the (designer)/eclipse directory.
I know it works the 2.0 and 2.1 have not tried it with 3.x. Remember this is old information. You can follow the idea, but use new files.
Designer and NICI#
I recently ran into some issues with Designer 4.0.1 on Linux, involving NICI. Designer uses NICI whenever it tries to communicate with a live system. The Designer 4.0.1 installer for Linux includes a NICI package, but the packagers decided to rename the RPM file to a more generic name (probably to simplify their task, and complicate ours). If you are running another Novell package that also uses NICI, like the Novell Client for Linux (NCL), there may be NICI conflicts. I was using the 64 bit NCL, which installed a 64 bit NICI package, 2.7.4-0.4.2.x86_64. Trying to install Designer 4.0.1 with the NCL installed produced an RPM Conflict issue. Designer 4.0.1 uses 32 bit NICI. The package they included, and renamed, turns out to be 2.7.6-0.01.i386. The RPM package manager produced a file conflict on 6 files, but the only one it would list would be the nicifk.new file. Therefore, it would not install NICI, which means Designer cannot talk to a live system. I knew this to be a NICI or JClient issue, so I checked the RPM packages (rpm -qa | grep nici). Only 64 bit listed as above. So, silly me, I figured I'd install the same 32 bit version (2.7.4-0.4.2.i386). Bad idea, Designer 4.0.1 not only will not work with that older version, it crashes hard (Bug Buddy!). I went from bad (not talking to eDir) to worse (CRASH!!!). Once I figured out which NICI Designer 4.0.1 really needed, all is well.
Moral of the story, watch your NICI versions. NICI now only comes with packages that need it, which means you could find yourself in a NICI version of dll H***. The NICI file in Designer 4.0.1 is called nici.i386.rpm. Not very friendly, you have to open it up to really figure out what version it is.
Settings#
things-set-when-you-install-designer#
things-set-when-you-install-designer
Designer.ini Values#
These were the Original values when we installed 4,02 Designer:-vm D:\Novell\Designer\jre\bin\javaw.exe -clean -vmargs -Xms256m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
Modified to try to speed up:
-vm D:\Novell\Designer\jre\bin\javaw.exe -clean -vmargs -Xms256m -Xmx1536m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:+UseParallelOldGC
Some other suggestions#
- disable "Build workspace automatically"
- Set local history to 1/1/1 instead of 7/50/1
- disable automatic SVN checking
- disable all automatic update and survey checking
- disable unused pages in Modeler (I only keep Developer and disable Architect, Dataflow, Table)
- close all unused views (e.g. Provisioning and Project Checker when working on driver packages, Version Control unless I need to do more than update/commit, which works from Outline and Project)
- remove unused packages from the catalog regularly
From lhaeger: Also an SSD really helps a LOT compared to a HDD, if you don't have one, order one today. Totally worth the money!
I also tweak designer.ini like David, just I do not get -Xmx2048m to work (on Windows) but rather top out at about -Xmx1280m (varies from machine to machine, no idea why. Just try until you get a startup error).
All of the above works fine for me with 30+ projects in the workspace (all but the currently used 2-5 ones disabled) with 10-50 drivers each. We do all development in packages and all projects are under version control.