Gotcha: EA Server config. XML file comments

Sybase EA Server (Ver 5.5) provides 2 interfaces for the admin to work with the Server and the Repository. Sybase Jaguar Manager is the GUI interface, that one can use to manage the Server and the repositories.

Jagtool is the command line equivalent of the above manager. There are a lot of things you can do in Jagtool and with host scripting (batch files in windows), you can make real powerful scripts to execute these in batch mode.

EA Server typically configures all elements using properties files. But, it also allows us to use XML files to configure the server. These are available at various levels such as Server, Package, Component, Connection Cache etc.

This gotcha is about writing comments in an XML file meant for configuring EA Server. Single line comments follow the XML/HTML standard.

<!!-- this is a single line comment -->

When you write multiline comment, make sure the tags are on their own line, thus:

<!!-- 
This is a 
multi-line 
comment 
-->

If you include any text in the first line, it will error out.

Note: You only need <!-- to mark the beginning of a comment; I doubled exclamation mark to avoid losing the comment line in view!! Otherwise, Wordpress HTML processor would have hidden it from view.