Automic Workload Automation

What are the suggested or recommended ways to compare objects from one environment to another?   Other than individually and visually. We have development groups that want to compare all the objects in a particular area between development and QA or between QA and Prod.   These are in different AE environments  (all AE v10.0.4) and databases.   The 'area' might be all the objects in a specific workflow, or all the objects in a particular project\folder. Somebody must have done this type of thing before, and we do want to 'borrow' rather than write from scratch. A primitive way is to create a transport case and export the objects from each environment and then do an OS file to file comparison  But that will also highlight changes in various time-stamps or other fields.   Would like to be more intelligent in the comparison.

We have little need for such comparisons on a routine basis between our Development, QA and Production Clients.  This is due to our relatively controlled change management process.  For us, the objects that are transported from our Development Client to QA and Production Clients are done so unmodified.  The source for all transports is always the Development Client.  If modifications are required to objects in QA to support those activities the source Development objects are never modified.  

Each Client has its own set of Variable objects that contain Client specific values that are substituted at generation time to tailor the various attributes that are unique to that Client.  These are the usual attributes such as: Login, Agent, file names, directories, etc and are usually accomplished using the PUT_ATT script statement contained in the Process or Pre Process tabs by common Include objects that are used to perform this runtime modification. 

This is not to say that we never perform object comparison.  To do this we usually Export the objects to be compared and use a comparison program that has text character masking or filtering.  For simple single object comparisons we use IDM's UltraCompare.  It supports the ability to ignore lines of text or specific strings.  For more complex multi-object comparisons we will transfer the Export files to our mainframe and use the SuperC compare utility which has relatively sophisticated commands to ignore or filter dates and other character strings.  We chose Export over Transport since Export's XML format is much more compact and readable than Transport's proprietary format and is independent of the Transport Case. 

I have always felt that the AE product should have a built-in facility for object comparison but I am not aware of one or even of future offerings. For us, the product's most glaring shortfall has always been its lack of a robust change control/management function or an ability  to be easily interfaced to other vendor's tools.  Though we do not use it, I always thought that this could be part of the ARA offering, either natively or somehow inserted as part of a process flow.  Perhaps this would be a good candidate for a Product Idea request.

Hey guys, 

Great suggestions here. I agree this would be a good candidate for a Product request. If you didn't already know, Automic has a site just for that! 

http://ideas.automic.com/

Hi Patrick,

Is the goal having prod match QA? If so you can automate this by creating a job that exports all objects from a particular client in  prod and then another job that loads it into QA.

Ian,  Not quite.  This is a symptom of our shooting at ourselves in different ways:

We have different groups that develop either in Dev or others that use QA as Dev-unit_test-QA all in one.   We have development and support groups in multiple sites around the world, we have had horrendous turnover (both layoffs and resignations), lots of short term consultants.   We have standards -- lots of them, essentially each dev group has defined their own, so there are not really defined and enforced corp standards..

So, as managers take over new groups, they are trying to get a handle on what they have, hence, the requests for a comparison utility.

If we come up with a decent idea, I will share it.

Pat

What we do right now is export them into XML and run a compare on that, like you mention. Some of our developers already have beyond compare and are partial to it but I like using Notepad++ with the compare plugin. Doesn't tune out the dates or other things you menitoned though, that would be usefull. 

I like the idea of intergrated compare purpose-built for for Automic!

There is treecompare tool added recently to Automic marketpalce which does object comparison and transfer. Maybe something which can help you,