Common Applications Features

Start-up parameters

Most of the applications support several start-up parameters which allow a certain level of preconfiguration of the application. Many of these parameters are unique to each of the applications, however, there are several which are common to all of them.

All start-up parameters can be supplied as program or JVM system parameters. There is no preferences how you load the parameter, the result will always be the same. However, if running the application with java webstart, one has to use system parameters.

To use a parameter as a program parameter one has to start the program as

java -cp [classpath] de.desy.tine.apps.<applicationClass> 
     [parameterTag#1]=[parameterValue#1] 
     [parameterTag#2]=[parameterValue#2] ...

When providing the parameters as system parameters the command is a little different

java -D[parameterTag#1]=[parameterValue#1] 
     -D[parameterTag#2]=[parameterValue#2] ... 
     -cp [classpath] de.desy.tine.apps.<applicationClass>

As you can see the difference is, that parameters are now defined before the main class and each of the parameters has a tag -D in front of it. This order is important, however, the order of [parameterTag#?] is not. If running the application with web start, one should do very similiar, except that D is replaced by -J-D

javaws -J-D[parameterTag#1]=[parameterValue#1] 
       -J-D[parameterTag#2]=[parameterValue#2] ... <URL>

If the start-up parameter contains spaces (is composed of multiple words), 
the parameter's value needs to be put in quotes.
eg. -Dcontact.name="Philip Duval"

Contact Information

Each application provides the application menu bar containing the Help menu. Inside the Help menu one will find About item which opens the about dialog for the application. The about dialog can be configured to provide the contact information for the person which is responsible for the particular application. These contact information is provided by three startup parametes:

  • contact.name - the name of the responsible person
  • contact.mail - the e-mail address of the responsible person (when clicking the name of the person, the compose message dialog will appear with the provided e-mail set)
  • contact.phone - the phone number of the responsible person.

    One can provide all or only a selection of the above parameters (if a parameter is not provided, the field in the about dialog will be left blank).

    java -cp [classpath] -Dcontact.name="Mark Lomperski" ... de.desy.tine.apps...

Logging Parameter

When using the application all unhandled exceptions that occured during the program will be logged to the console. If one wants to print the into a file instead, he can define the property codeapp.logToFile/code and set its value to true. The application will create a log file named i[applicationName].log/i in the root folder of the application and print all the stacktraces to this file. 

java -cp [classpath] -Dapp.logToFile=TRUE ... de.desy.tine.apps...

Debug Parameter

When debugging an application one can set the debug level which defines what will be printed out to the console. Each application supports several debug levels (the supported levels are explicitely defined on individual pages; if a non supported level is provided the highest level for that application will be used):

  • 0 - no printouts
  • 1 - all calls to TINE are logged and results printed
  • 2 - when making a structured call to TINE all steps are logged
  • 3 - results are printed in the long form - complete loaded structures are printed
  • 4 - non-TINE related logs (file saving etc.)

    The debug level can be set using the app.debug.level parameter.

    java -cp [classpath] -Dapp.debug.level=2 ... de.desy.tine.apps...