6.1 Deployment Considerations
When you maintain separate systems for development and production work, you must understand the steps necessary to successfully and completely deploy a LANSA Composer solution from one system to the other.
Composer provides export and import features to support your deployment needs. The export and import features are capable of largely automating most of the work of deploying LANSA Composer solutions, but there are some steps that you must perform yourself and some considerations you should take account of.
These considerations apply to:
Transport and Other Configurations
Security Credentials for Transport and Other Configurations
If you define your own custom Activities, then you will need to deploy them to all systems on which you wish to use them.
There are two parts to a complete and functioning Activity:
1. The Activity definition - you can use LANSA Composer's export and import support to deploy the Activity definitions.
2. The Activity processor - this is the executable code (a LANSA re-useable part) that implements the Activity. It is your responsibility to deploy the Activity processor as required. You might wish to use LANSA's export and import support or the Visual LANSA Deployment Tool to accomplish this. Refer to your LANSA documentation for information about deploying LANSA applications.
You should not normally need to export or import the definitions of Activities supplied with LANSA Composer other than as instructed during an installation or upgrade of LANSA Composer. You should not change the definitions of these Activities.
When you export Activity definitions, LANSA Composer exports the Activity Groups to which the Activity is assigned on the source system.
When you import the Activity definitions to the target system, LANSA Composer will assign the Activity to the same Activity Groups, . LANSA Composer will not create the Activity Group on the target system. You must deploy or define the Activity Groups to the target system prior to importing the Activity definitions.
Note that failing to assign the Activity Groups on the target system will not affect the functioning of the Activity or of Processing Sequences that use it. Activity Groups are simply a means of categorizing the Activities for quick access while maintaining Activity definitions or when editing a processing sequence.
You can deploy trading partners between LANSA Composer installations using the export and import features, in the same way as other definitions.
If you are using installation-defined properties for Trading Partners, then the values defined for those properties for each Trading Partner will be included in the export. When you import the Trading Partner definitions to the target system, LANSA Composer will import the values for the installation-defined Trading Partner properties, . You must deploy or define the Trading Partner installation-defined properties to the target system prior to importing the Trading Partner definitions. The same applies to Trading Partner groups.
When you export trading partner definitions, the export includes the definition of which configurations, transformation maps and directories are linked to the trading partner. However the actual configurations and transformation maps are not automatically included - it is your responsibility to ensure the configurations and transformation maps exist on the target system. If they do, then the trading partner import will restore the links.
With regard to the linked directories, in particular, you may wish to structure the directory paths such that they are the same on each installation. If you don't, you may have to manually alter this aspect of trading partner definitions on the target system after importing them.
The complete definition of a Transformation map in LANSA Composer consists of:
1. Those parts held in the LANSA Composer database. For a map that has been successfully prepared, this includes:
- Basic identifying information such as the name and description for the map;
- Information about the parameters that must be supplied to execute the map;
- Catalogued information about the map including information identifying the major components used in the map definition;
- Catalogued copies of the map definition and implementation files as at the last successful prepare.
When you export Transformation maps, all this information is included in the export, including the map definition and implementation files (subject to the options chosen in ).
2. The files held in the file system that are associated with the Transformation Map such as the map definition (.mfd) and map executable (.jar) files.
When you export Transformation maps that have been successfully prepared with LANSA Composer version 4.0 or later, LANSA Composer exports the catalogued versions of the files (from the LANSA Composer database) in preference to the files held in the file system. If the catalogued files do not match those held in the file system, LANSA Composer will issue a warning in the export log, but the catalogued versions are exported nonetheless.
If the catalogued versions of the files are not available (for example, if the map has not been prepared or if the map was prepared with an earlier version of LANSA Composer), LANSA Composer exports the versions of the files held in the file system.
Some other points to note about deploying Transformation maps:
- The Transformation Map definition (.mfd file) is not required at run-time. It is only required to display or revise the Transformation Map using the mapping tool. Whether to copy and deploy these definitions is a matter of source and version control rather than a deployment requirement.
- LANSA Composer's export and import support can deploy the map executable (.jar) files as described above and according to the options chosen in . Normally you should deploy these files, since the affected Transformation Maps cannot be executed without them.
- When importing a map for which an MFT (Flextext configuration) file was catalogued and exported, the MFT file is catalogued in LANSA Composer's file store database on the importing system, but it is NOT written to the file system (UNLIKE the MFD and JAR files). This is deliberately so, since such files may be (often will be) shared between more than one map. Also, because there is no LANSA Composer-mandated location for such files (it is specified in the map definition).
Note: Including the Transformation Map executable files (the files) in an export will very considerably increase the size of the export file. For easiest handling and to avoid exceeding system limits, you may need to modularize or separate the export of individual Transformation Maps or groups of Transformation Maps to allow for this.
When you export Processing Sequence definitions, the exported definition does not include the version history for the Processing Sequence. Only the current definition is exported.
Transport and Other Configurations
The transport and other configurations feature of LANSA Composer provides a separation between the configuration information (which might vary from one system to another) and the Processing Sequences that use them.
This means, for example, that when you deploy a Processing Sequence from one system to another, while the Processing Sequence uses a set of named configurations, the actual definitions of the configurations can be different on the 'development' system to the 'production' system. Thus the same Processing Sequence can be executed on both systems using the transport and database configuration details appropriate to that system.
If you use Configurations in this way, then you probably will not wish to deploy them between systems, other than when you initially create them. If you do deploy them, you will need to change their definitions after importing them to the target system.
For Configurations that are dependent on external files or objects (such as the body text file for an SMTP Mail Details Configuration), it is your responsibility to ensure that the external files or objects are deployed to or accessible from the target system.
Security Credentials for Transport and Other Configurations
LANSA Composer does export or import passwords associated with security credentials contained in transport and other configurations. This means that you must manually change the configuration on the target system after importing it the first time, to specify the password (and, probably, the user) that applies on that system.
User names, where specified, are exported. However, it is likely in many cases that the user names will also have to be changed on the target system.
LANSA Composer will , by default, replace the security credentials on the importing system when a configuration being imported already exists. This means you can import the configurations again without having to re-enter the user and password details. The window allows you to override this behavior, if you wish, such that the user names are imported and the existing password data is invalidated (passwords will have to be re-entered).
LANSA Composer's export and import support can deploy code values. When you export a group of code values (for example, Activity Groups), all the code values in that group are exported. When you import them to the target system, they add to or update any code values already present. Code values defined on the target system that are not included in the export are not removed.
You can deploy System Properties using LANSA Composer's export and import features.
When you import System Properties, by default LANSA Composer will replace the of the System Property if it already exists on the importing system. The window allows you to override this behavior, if you wish
When you deploy System Properties that are evaluated and/or set by means of a call to a user-specified function, it is your responsibility to deploy the required function(s) to the target LANSA Composer system.
LANSA Composer does not export or import System Settings. It is your responsibility to ensure that the System Settings are defined on the target system with values appropriate for that environment. You normally only need to do this once.