Migrating Configuration

Enterprise customers will want to develop and test configuration in a separate environment to the 'live' or 'production' environment to ensure that there is no risk of adversely impacting end users who are actively using the live environment.  Once the configuration changes have been completed and successfully tested they should be migrated to the production environment. The Anywhere Platform provides a mechanism to migrate configuration to save having to repeat it and risk errors.

There are three key entities involved in migrating configuration: Packages, Environments and Migrations

Packages provide a logical grouping of configuration entities. This might be a collection of changes for a period that need to be migrated together. An example, might be a new or updated process template or a new report template.

Environments are a record of the instances which a customer has access to. This might be one or more non-production environment for example 'Development', 'Test' or 'Training' as well as the 'Production' environment.

Migrations are an instance of migrating a package from one environment to another.

It is recommended that all configuration changes, no matter how small, are carried out and then tested in a non-production environment and then migrated to production. This will ensure consistency of the configuration and provide stability for end-users of the platform.

• The pre-requisites for a migration are as follows:

  1. The environment being migrated to must have at least two environments defined: one pointing to itself and one for each of the environments from which configuration may be sourced. Migrations take place in the target environment and 'pull' configuration from a source. 

  2. The source environment must have at least 1 package containing one or more configuration items.

• The following configuration entities can be migrated

  1. Process templates

  2. Report Definitions

  3. Validations

  4. Datasources

  5. Content Area Definitions

  6. Groups

  7. Email Templates

  8. Menus

• Environments are created and edited from the Environments Dashboard 

• The dashboard can be accessed from the Configuration workbench. From the menu (in the target environment), select 'Configuration' under the 'Administration' section. This will open the configuration workbench.

• From the configuration workbench select Environments from the Migration section.

• Packages represent a logical bundle of configuration items

• Environments are created and edited from the Packages Dashboard. Only packages in the local (current) environment can be edited.

• Packages in other environments can also be viewed from the Packages Dashboard.

• The dashboard can be accessed from the Configuration Workbench. From the menu, select Configuration under the Administration section. This will open the configuration workbench.

• From the configuration workbench select Packages from the Migration section.

• A migration is a request to migrate configuration from one instance of The Anywhere Platform to another. An example might be a request to migrate configuration from the Non-Production environment to Production once all development and testing has completed.

• Migrations are only relevant to customers with more than one instance of The Anywhere Platform.

• Migrations are initiated in the target environment. In this respect, migrations always 'pull' configuration changes and are never pushed. This ensures that someone without authority cannot push configuration changes into a production environment.

• Migrations are initiated from the Migrations Dashboard 

• The dashboard can be accessed from the Configuration Workbench. From the menu, select Configuration under the Administration section. This will open the configuration workbench.

• From the configuration workbench select Migrations from the Migration section.

• When a configuration item is migrated to another environment and that configuration item existed prior to the migration, a new version of the configuration item will be created.

• To view the list of versions for the configuration item, navigate to that configuration item's History tab.

• Versions created from a migration will have the description: 'Migrated from <source URL>'. It will be labelled 'This Version' (assuming no other changes have happened since the migration).

• To back out or revert the migration click on Restore next to the row immediately below the migration. This will restore the configuration to the earlier version.