Have spent some time the last week teaching myself the basics of Rational Automation Framework (RAFW) together with WebSphere Application Server 7. The RAFW-version I’m using is just an old beta, so it misses some features and have some bugs which the current release 7.1.1.2 have taken care of.
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WAS 7 have a new feature which enables you to provide a custom name BASE application servers. Not the most important feature, but using a more meaningful name than the default “server1” can be useful. But the beta-version of RAFW did not have this feature, so at first I thought “close, but no sigar” until Scott Bybee at Ascendant encouraged me to try to create a custom action providing this feature. Spent two days figuring this out until I was able to create a custom action providing this feature. It was really all about understanding the ANT-scripts RAFW is using, when that was taken care of it was really just a walk in the park to adjust the action into providing the custom name feature.
This was not a big issue, but the main purpose of doing this was understanding how to create a custom action in RAFW, which might be useful for other more critical features or needs which out-of-the-box RAFW does not provide.