How to Find All References to a Specific Parameter Using the Workflow Parameter Reporter

Use this utility to find all instances of a parameter value used in every workflow.

Sometimes the need arises to make mass changes to a given parameter and a developer will need the ability to find all references to that parameter.

The Parameter Value Reporter lets you to search all workflows within the Kinetic Platform and returns the parameter values of of any relevant handlers. Simply enter a keyword and the utility searches all the trees. If a node contains the keyword, the utility records the parameters and related values in a CSV output file.

Support

If you have questions regarding this utility, please feel free to contact Kinetic Data Support.

Support is available Monday through Friday between 8AM and 5PM US Central Time.

Download

The Parameter Value Reporter utility comes packaged as a jar file that can be executed from a command prompt. It requires a Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.6 or greater installation to run.

parameter-value-reporter.jar

Commands

This section documents each of the commands made available by the parameter-value-reporter.jar file.

Setup

The setup command prompts for the information necessary to connect to a Kinetic Task environment. It stores the server information and login credentials in a file name config.yml.

java -jar parameter-value-reporter.jar -setup
If you enter an incorrect value or wish to run the tree converter against another environment just re-run the setup command and it will overwrite any existing config.yml.

Note that all of the following commands require the presence of the config.yml file and will raise an error if one is not present.

Keyword

The "parameters" command will get the parameters for the handler(s) that have an ID containing the keyword that is entered. It will iterate through all the trees and save the values, producing a CSV file.

java -jar parameter-value-reporter.jar -keyword <KEYWORD>
Example: java -jar parameter-value-reporter.jar -keyword active_directory_user_retrieve

In the example above, it will search all the trees for handlers that have "active_directory_user_retrieve" in its ID. That being said, this will return the handlers of the different versions (ie: active_directory_user_retrieve_v1, active_directory_user_retrieve_v2, etc.) as well as handlers that contain the keyword (ie: bmc_active_directory_user_retrieve, etc.).

Alternatively, if the entered keyword was just "active_directory_user", it will return: active_directory_user_create, active_directory_user_disable, etc.

Note: Keep in mind, if the keyword is generic and returns multiple handlers, the parameters are a collection of every handler that was matched. The CSV will not distinguish which handlers contain which parameters.

Version

This command prints the current version of the Parameter Value Reporter utility.

java -jar parameter-value-reporter.jar -version

Usage

The following is the recommended usage pattern of the Parameter Value Reporter.

Run the setup command. This will create the config.yml file that contains connection information for the Kinetic Task environment.
Run the keyword command. This searches the handler ID in every tree of the Task environment and, if matched, will record the value and produce a CSV file in the same directory of the parameter-value-reporter.jar file.
Open the CSV file. Tree and Node are the first two columns. The rest of the columns are all of the parameters that were found in all of the handlers that it matched.

Files

This section provides some examples and descriptions of all of the files mentioned above.

config.yml

The config.yml file is generated by running the setup command. It contains the server information and credentials necessary to connect to the Kinetic Task environment. The contents of an example config.yml are shown below.

config yml

The utility expects this file to be present when any of the other commands are run.

CSV

This is the CSV that is created after the keyword action has been ran. The file name will contain the keyword that was entered followed by the timestamp. For example active_directory_user_retrieve-report-2015-01-07T094146-0600.csv. Below is an example of what the contents of the CSV look like.

parameter-value-reporter csv

Note that in this screenshot, the CSV is opened in a spreadsheet editor rather than a text editor because it makes the data easier to read.

Column Descriptions

TreeThe tree the handler is in
NodeThe handler id of the node
...Every column following Tree and Node is a parameter of all the handlers containing the keyword that was entered. This is a collection of all the parameters that were found in all the matched handlers. There is no distinction between which handlers had what parameters. Format: parameter id (Parameter Display Label)