Integrating the Rational team concert with the Visual Basic scripting language

Scene

Let's say you're using a system built with the latest technology to achieve compliance. You must enter development information. The system is very stable, so IT managers decide not to maintain the system unless there are security vulnerabilities and flaws associated with the new operating system patches. It is also assumed that IBM Rational team concert was introduced to the development teams to support global delivery. Developers may not want to waste valuable time entering the same information into two systems. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the technology for integrating such systems.

Figure 1 shows a target image for this article. The My system is used to enter some type of development information that has a COM + interface to the system, and the team has introduced Rational teams concert to accelerate global delivery. The Rational Team concert has an open interface called OSLC (Open Lifecycle Collaboration service).

Figure 1. The goal is to integrate an existing system, my system, with Rational team concert

Disclaimers and prerequisites for using these sample scripts

The sample script is used only as a sample and should be used as is. If you receive an error message that is similar to the following message in the trial script, it may be because the Rational team concert server is set to use Self authentication:

Msxml3.dll:System Error:-2146697191

Msxml3.dll:The system cannot locate the resource specified.

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the server, you will get a certificate error message. This is because the client does not trust the server because it is set up to authenticate itself. To use the sample script, you must first resolve the problem.

OSLC is an open community of software developers and organizations dedicated to standardizing the integration of various software development lifecycle tools. It also defines the specification for tool integration. The core specification is to use RDF (Resource Description framework) as a data representation to access data using the RESTful Web service. However, my System provides its own interface. In this case, the interface is COM + (Component Object Model Plus) that can be accessed in a variety of languages, including Microsoft Visual Basic or Visual Basic scripting languages.

This article describes how to access two systems using the Visual Basic scripting language. The sample script is provided in the article (see the Download section). These sample scripts use the OSLC change Management specification and Rational team concert as tools. This script processes the data called the work item. The script creates, updates, or queries a Rational team concert work item.

OSLC Service and Overview of this Visual Basic script

Figure 2 shows the flowchart for the OSLC service, which flows through the Catalog and service Provider from the Root service Document and finally arrives at the Work Item.

Figure 2. OSLC Service Overview

The first step is to access the Root Service Document. This service provides a directory of services. For example, it provides a CM (change management) service directory (as shown in Figure 2), an SCM (source control) service directory, a project area Management Services directory, and so on. In the example in this article:

CM provides access services to work items.

The directory provides the service provider URL for each project area.

Service providers support access to work items.

This script uses a set of services called Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML). MSXML can handle xml-based applications in a fast and efficient way. It also has various APIs to handle the content of XML documents. OSLC uses RDF as a data representation, and MSXML can also process RDF documents.