Hi there “Process Automation” fans,

Welcome to a new installment of “Process Automation” tips.

After 7 years of eXperience, you would guess that you’ve seen it all! Clearly, this is not the case after a highly intense session with OpenText PS people solving a critical problem. From experience, I know that these are the moments to pay attention very, very well as this is where the real magic tools and settings pass by for deep screening and following events from backend to frontend. This post exposes such setting that might help you to solve that one critical problem yourself.

Let’s get right into it…

The setting I’m talking about is trace.messages.to.entityruntime.enabled=true, and you set it in the ‘wcp.properties’ file. Give it a shot, restart the TomEE instance after this change, and watch close what happens in this log directory $CORDYS_HOME/Logs/entity/...

Create a small project with a simple entity, and do a quick publication.

After this, you will have a file to inspect:

sudo cat /opt/opentext/ProcessAutomationCE/defaultInst/Logs/entity/json.txt

This is what you’ll find in the file:

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Mon Oct 20 11:49:59 CEST 2025, PUT: /Elements?tenantScope=Local&mode=Deploy
    JSON-REQUEST
Mon Oct 20 11:49:59 CEST 2025, Response:
    JSON-RESPONSE

These are the 2 JSON files for you to investigate:

JSON-REQUEST
JSON-RESPONSE

I see a full blueprint of my ‘Project’ entity passing by with all its settings…I did a clean build output! When I update my project entity with an additional property I see far fewer details passing by which sounds logic to me. So, my conclusion is this file tells what exactly is passed over from design-time to runtime. Interesting, if you expect things in runtime that are not there!

This only works for entities; BPMs, Web libraries, or any others are not passing by. It’s what it is.

…

Now for that great question: What else “trace” settings can we find?

This is a quick Unix search over the JAR files of the platform:

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find /opt/opentext/ProcessAutomationCE/defaultInst/components/ -iname '*.jar' -print | while read jar; do
  echo "$jar:"
  unzip -qq -l $jar | sed 's/.* //' | while read cls; do
    unzip -c $jar $cls | grep -q 'trace.' && echo "   "$cls
  done
done

Eventually we get back to an old friend com.cordys.cws.internal.settings.SettingsManager in the components/cws/cws.jar file where we see also these settings passing by:

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trace.server=true
trace.service.registration=true
trace.team.development=true
trace.workspace=true
trace.buildengine=true
trace.session.load=true
trace.session.update=true
trace.repository.load=true
trace.repository.update=true
trace.repository.repository=true
trace.soap.load=true
trace.soap.operation=true
trace.soap.update=true

All fascinating settings which I leave for you to try out. One interesting thing I do see…trace.messages.to.entityruntime.enabled is set in the ./config/wcp.properties file, but in the past we did a setting (from that same ‘SettingsManager’ class) in the ./components/cws/config/cws.properties file!? So, which setting to put in which file remains unclear at this moment! For now, fine, but let’s see if the future will help us again on these settings. Now we know at least where to find them.

A great “DONE” with another secret (and fascinating) flag exposed for your knowledge. Again, communication, watching others, and asking questions is the only way exposing these maintenance tricks. If it’s up to me, we share all the hidden flags for our benefits…Let’s see what the future will bring in all the session to come. Have a great weekend, and we see each-other in another episode of “OpenText Process Automation Tips”, next week.

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