These observations are for Tibco Designer 5.6 and Tibco BusinessWorks 5.6.

When developing Tibco BusinessWorks processes in Designer it is often necessary to test your BusinessWorks processes against other BW processes deployed on a server. Let's suppose we want to change a process that is already deployed on a server.

Open first the process in Designer and make your changes. The next thing is testing your process.

To test first go to Tibco Administrator and find the service instance running the process you have been changing. Go to BW Processes and select Process Starters. From there disable the process starter that invokes the process you have been changing in Designer.

Next make sure your global variables in Designer match those of the other processes and systems on the server you want to test against. For example if you use JMS then your process in Designer has to use the EMS server on the environment you want to test against.

Setting global variables can be done in several ways. One way is simply directly change your global variables in Designer. If your code is maintained in a version control system this may mean that you have to check out files and then later revert your changes. That is if Designer reads its BusinessWorks code directly from a version control system.

Fortunately it is possible not to touch the version control system just for setting test configurations. Instead you can edit the file properties.cfg in the Designer directory, e.g. in c:/tibco/designer/5.6. The syntax is:

tibco.clientVar.<variablePathAndName>=<value>

where variablePathAndName is the name of the variable you wish to set, including the path to the variable if it is contained in a folder. value is the value you wish to set the variable to. I am slightly reformulating the remark in the Designer documentation here.

Example: if you have a global variable named item1 contained in a folder named myGroup and you wish to set its value to 500, add the line to properties.cfg:

tibco.clientVar.myGroup/item1=500

Setting global variables in properties.cfg requires restart of Tibco Designer. So don't forget to do this after saving properties.cfg.

One can set up the file properties.cfg to use several environments. Use the hash sign (#) to comment out the global variables for the environments that are not involved in your current tests.