Automic Continuous Delivery Automation

We are considering the set up of a new client specifically for the purpose of new workflow development and testing.

Our thinking is something like this....Once a new workflow has been tested and cleared review we would "promote" it from the DEV Client to the PROD Client. 

Has anyone done something similar to this?

How did you accomplish it?

How has it worked in your environment?

What do we need to be mindful of?

Thanks in advance,

Bryan

Hi,

I have done that for several customers.

There is actually no "easy" way of achieving this, one way is using composite actions and, inside them, the regular actions, and then "stage" that custom action pack with the composite actions.

Another way would be to export the workflows either by means of ARA (soap interface) or the AE export function.

A third way would be to use the DeepExport feature.

It is key to understand your very usecase to give you hints what might be the best option in your case because it's not only the workflow, it might also be the Actions and the Dynamic Properties etc. that need to be staged

Regards,

Martin

Importexportcli might be a good tool to look at.

So far, we've done a trial run on a fairly simple workflow with the importexportcli tool using deepExport. We've got that working but are concerned as we get into workflows that have custom actions. 

Are we better off creating our own action packs to export those or is the importexport tool smart enough to encode those in the xml output?

Thanks for your insights....

You have to be careful with the importexportcli, because you have to fullfill pre conditions to be able to import, what you have exported.

The two importnant ones are:

• You have to have a User with the same name as in the source system.
• You have to have Folders with the same name as in the source system.

Exporting custom Actions should work fine and easy over GUI and cli (apm), so this would be the easiest way to get functionality from one system to another.

Hi,

be aware of the order to import:

1) Users/Groups & Folders

2) Custom Action Packs

3) DeepImport/Workflows

Otherwise, parts might not work because e.g. the folder or owner of an application does not yet exist.

And also, a Workflow might use an action that does not yet exist.

Regards,

Martin

Workflows that contain custom actions will get exported, however the custom actions themselves won't.

I.e. you can open up the staged workflow, but if you try opening up a custom action inside it will tell you that it can't find the object, the custom action will not get encoded in the xml with deepexport.

You can however stage custom actions by exporting and importing the action pack via apm, the package manager CLI (this can be done both before or after deepimport).

Additionally, keep in mind that custom types (if you have created your own) will also need to be exported/imported into the staged environment, this can be done via the admin cli.