Creating a Service Optimization corpus for Xoom (technical)

Xoom was able to mock a Service Optimization environment for the purposes of Xoom customisation and support since version 3.0. In version 3.1, this ability has been expanded, allowing a higher degree of control over what information is captured and how that information is used during environment reconstruction. Here we provide the information on how to create a corpus containing the captured communication.

In Xoom version 3.1.1, a new command line tool called AutoCapture has been included. The tool automates the process described below. The tool is used from the command line from within the Xoom folder (usually C:\Program Files\Zany Ants\Xoom) as follows:

AutoCapture.exe C:\XoomCorpusRoot

The parameter specifies the folder in which the corpus will be located (in this example C:\XoomCorpusRoot). The only condition for such a folder is that it is empty, as a corpus can’t be amended once it’s been created. The tool will verify that a Service Optimization server is running and that the supplied folder is empty, and abort with a descriptive error if either is not true.

Here are the manual steps to create a complete corpus:

  1. Stop the Xoom service via Services administrative panel.
  2. Open the command line interface, change directory to the main Xoom folder (usually C:\Program Files\Zany Ants\Xoom) and type the following:
    ZanyAnts.Xoom.Wcf.WindowsService.exe --RunAsApp
             --param:Mocks.CorpusRoot=C:\XoomCorpusRoot
             --param:Mocks.XoomConfig.Mode=capture
             --param:Product.W6.Mocks.Mode=capture

    The command above has been formatted in several lines to make it more readable, but it should be typed on a single command line.

    A small Xoom Service window will open. Click Start. This will start the Xoom service in a mode that causes all communication with the Service Optimization server to be captured and stored for a replay later. The information will in this case be saved in folder C:\XoomCorpusRoot, but the parameter’s value can be changed to specify a different location.

  3. The next step is to capture all relevant communication. We recommend the following steps to be performed:
    • Open Settings Migration Tool, click on Connect (to create the session and the admin tree), click All and perform an export. Include all dependencies in the export and close the tool once done.
    • Open Xoom Explorer, connect to the local server to get a list of queries, and perform a Get on each of the queries. The response doesn’t need to be stored. You can close the tool once all queries have been run.

    Different or additional steps can be performed in order to capture other types of communication, or if the purpose of the capture is a reconstruction of a specific problem.

  4. Once all desired communication has been collected, click on Stop on the Xoom Service window in order to consolidate the corpus, and close the window.
  5. Restart the Xoom service if desired.
  6. The corpus is now ready for use in the folder that was selected, in our case C:\XoomCorpusRoot. If the corpus is to be shared with Zany Ants, the whole folder should be zipped and sent over.

2 thoughts on “Creating a Service Optimization corpus for Xoom (technical)”

Comments are closed.