EPM - Did you know? #3

Today I am going to be continuing the “did you know” series with the third instalment.

This time the randomiser has picked:

Did you know where the EAS console picks the version/patch number from?

I previously wrote a blog on understanding product versions in workspace, in the post I did not cover EAS and I know sometimes there can be confusion on the versioning in the console so here is a brief overview on how it works.

In the console if you go to “Help” and select “About Essbase Administration Services” then the following dialog box will open.

As you can see it displays three product version numbers, I have no idea why Business Rules is still included as it was removed in 11.1.2.2 and this causes the version to default to 4.1.1.

The first question is it the server version for EAS and APS and the answer is no it is only the version of the files being used in the console.

You can tell that by the MSI console version as you don’t even need to connect to the EAS server for it return the version and even when you connect it does not make any difference.

With the web console it downloads the latest versions of the java files from the EAS server so usually the console and server will be in sync.

So where is the version generated from, well both the web and MSI console use a java archive called eas_client.jar, the MSI version is located in

<MIDDLEWARE_HOME>\EPMSystem11R1\products\Essbase\eas\console\lib

The web console downloads the file from the EAS server and the file is contained in the EAS web application file:

<MIDDLEWARE_HOME>\EPMSystem11R1\products\Essbase\eas\server\AppServer\InstallableApps\Common\eas.ear

If you open the java archive there is a directory which contains property files and the AboutDialog.properties has some of the information we are after.
 

The VersionNo property contains the information that it is displayed in the console.

To prove it I updated the version and then loaded up the console again.

So that covers the EAS version so how about the APS version.

This is generated from a different java archive ess_es_gui.jar which is also used by the console:

The version is derived from the manifest file in the META-INF directory, the manifest is a special file that can contain information about the files packaged in an archive file and in this case the version is read from the Implementation-Version line.

Once again I updated the version number.

Loaded up the console again and the version had changed.

You may sometimes find that with patch releases that the jar files are not updated so the version number does not match to the patched server version.

Well at least you should now understand how the versioning works in the console.