Taskcentre is a software product created by Orbis Software. Taskcentre is “middleware” software which integrates between various software products, ranging from high end ERP solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics Nav, to other pieces of software such as Magento. This is not really a marketing blog post, so for further information, have a look at their website or just ask 🙂
If there is a problem with a task, Taskcentre automatically sends an email to system administrators. Sometimes email is not a reliable messaging system (for example if the email server is down), so in this blog post, I’m going to show how to integrate Taskcentre into itself and post to the free private chat system for business HipChat. Although it is possible to do pretty much anything with the error (you could even print it out on a printer or tweet it if required..!)
To integrate Taskcentre into HipChat for alerting, there are 3 steps which are required:
- Integrate Taskcentre into Taskcentre
- Integrate Taskcentre into HipChat
- Join it all together!
Integrate Taskcentre Into Taskcentre
Firstly we can only do this if Taskcentre is set up to use the SQL database option. If your still using the integrated database, I’d recommend changing to the SQL option. Not only does this improve performance, it also allows further analysis of logs.
If we look at the database structure, there are 2 tables which we require for this project.
- EventLog – This contains all event log entries
- Tasks – This contains all the tasks within the Taskcentre installation
We need to first create a SQL trigger on the EventLog table. This is to look for errors related to tasks which have failed. This is done by filtering the table where EventType = 2 AND TaskID >0 (EventType 2 is Error, Ensuring the TaskId is greater than 0 ensures that it only triggers for task errors.)
When the trigger fires, this passes the “EventID” to a variable called “EventID”. (We use this when the task triggers so that we know which row caused the task to run.)
Integrating Taskcentre into HipChat
Integration into HipChat is done with the XML Webservice Tool in Taskcentre. The tool allows Taskcentre to call XML Web Services. In this case, we wish to call the Send Room Notification web service.
This web service requires the following:
- id_or_name The name of the room to send the message
- color (or Colour for the non american) – The colour of the message
- message The message to post
- notify Should it trigger a user notification
- message_format Is the message HTML or plain text
- auth_token The authentication Token
In order to post, we need to create an authentication token via the HipChat website. The best option is to create a room token with an associated “Label”. This is available HipChat Rooms This is then stored in Taskcentre, allowing it to post onto HipChat under the associated “Label”.
Alternatively, a personal authentication token could be used. The only downside with this is that it will post under your name instead of the pre-defined name for taskcentre. A personal token can be created here: Create Personal Token
Join it all together!
So now we can trigger from Taskcentre for every error, and also post to a HipChat room. All we need to do is join it together.
In order to ensure that the message is clear in HipChat (since the EventID is a bit useless on it’s own), We add a OLEDB connection to the taskcentre database and execute the following script. Note that I’ve excluded the current task from this query (I could do it within the Trigger, however we’d have to look up the TaskID and filter that one out – quite messy). This is to ensure that Taskcentre doesn’t get into a “while true” loop if there is an issue with this task.
SELECT
Tasks.TaskName AS TaskName,
EventLog.EventDesc AS EventDesc,
EventLog.EventTime AS EventTime
FROM
Tasks INNER JOIN EventLog ON Tasks.TaskID = EventLog.TaskID
WHERE
Tasks.TaskName <> 'Hipchat Error Posting'
AND EventLog.EventID = {=Variables("EventID")}
Putting it all together, we get the following task:
When an error is thrown in Taskcentre, the following is shown in HipChat:
Note: Although this is working well, for some reason the “notify” parameter is not working correctly. Regardless of what I pass to it (“false”,”true”,”0″,”1″,”yes”,”no”, Cbool(True) etc) it throws the following error. I’m wondering if it’s an issue with the webservice itself. Will continue testing to try and find a solution for this.
Value u'false' for field 'notify' is not of type 'boolean'
