How To Map Password Type Global Variable In Activity Input

As you may already know, you cannot map a global variable that is a password type to the Activity Input. You can only map it to a Shared Configuration resource when possible. One way to retrieve the global variable password value is to write a Java code. But there is another preferable way to have one less activity in your process definition, and that is using a Java Custom Function. Of course, you will still write Java code one time, but it's a whole lot reusable; and you can export it as a Project Library that you can use in a different Designer project. So you want to write a Java code, but you are not quite sure which JAR file the Java class is located; on the other hand, you know the fully qualified name of the class and the method name to invoke. Personally, I find it appropriate to use The Reflection API to write a few lines of code in order to achieve this.

We want to have a function that retrieves the value of a password global variable passing the global variable path as an argument. The path means something like a Unix file path. You will have to write a Java class such as below. The getProperty is a static method, so you can pass null in lieu of an object as an argument. As you can see, it's very simple and straightforward, but through this approach you can compile this Java class without including any JAR file to the class path.

public class PasswordDecryptor {

    public static String getPasswordGlobalVariable(String path) {
        String result = null;
        try {
            Class<?> c = Class.forName("com.tibco.pe.plugin.PluginProperties");
            Method m = c.getMethod("getProperty", String.class);
            result = (String) m.invoke(null, "tibco.clientVar."+path);
        } catch(Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        return result;
    }

}