CA Service Management

Hi,

Recently I've been looking into the "save and set to test mode" feature contained within the Schema Designer in Web Screen Painter. Unfortunately, I've not really had a chance to play about with it too much and have only found out what there is available online, which unfortunately again, doesn't seem to be much.

I am however, confused by what I've found. Even the wording of the function confuses me as surely you would want to be in a test mode before saving any changes.

From what I understand, it creates the changes in the database but only modifies the web engine of WSP meaning that changes don't affect the proper web engine so the Service Desk won't crash with any mistakes.

My questions are thus:

1) Am I correct in my understanding?

2) Is this part of the tool actually useful? 

I say number 2 because in my head, you wouldn't be able to add records to the database to be able to test them and I feel like making any changes in the database could potentially cause problems.

I would really appreciate any responses about where it does come in useful, or documentation on its use. Thanks very much in advance.

Hi Austin,

You bring up a good question.  The answer is that WSP Schema Designer itself does NOT modify the physical database.  Its the "pdm_publish" command that actually writes the schema changes to the database after you save-and-publish in schema designer.  That said, what WSP Schema Designer DOES do is adds the fields to the "object layer" - that being the WSP Domsrvr, which is used by the WSP Webengine.  Test mode allows you to test out the fields by using the WSP domsrvr and WSP webengine, and I believe it stores the values in memory while testing, but wont write to the db as the fields dont exist in the db at that time. Now if you are looking to test something that is somewhat complex, like adding several tables, and building relationships between those new tables and existing tables etc. - that is something that you are better off testing in a test system of some sort so that you can fully test the changes in a reality world instead of in a test-mode world where its not writing them to the database.  Although you should be able to test most changes using WSP test mode as well, so it IS useful, however, its still better to use a real test system.  What I recommend is to take a snapshot of the application side and the database side prior to testing out schema changes so that you can roll back if something goes rogue on you there.

Hope this helps a bit,

Thanks,
Jon I.

Hi Jon, thanks for the explanation, it's very much appreciated. So is that to say then that you could create the new schema in test mode and also create a page to input new values, using the Preview function, enter new values and then later on decide whether to revert or complete the changes to the schema?