SAP Work Manager – Development Publish vs Production Publish?

[sean_durr1]

I have read a number of articles and information within the various SAP Help guides related to Publishing Agentry Apps from within the SAP Agentry Editor, which indicate that you use 'Development' Publish and / or 'Production Publish depending on where you are in your project lifecycle.

However, it has also been recommended that I ignore the 'Development' Publish altogether as there are no real benefits to using it.

So, based on other people's experience of this, should I be using both publishing options at different times or am I safe to just use the 'Production' Publish every time we make any modifications to the Agentry Application (in my case the SAP Work Manager 6.2.1 Application)?

For information, we will have dedicated Development, QA and Production SMP 3.0 SP08 systems (i.e. 3 system landscape).

Regards,

Sean.

[resmi_sadasivan2]

Hi Sean,

You could also refer below document that explains the difference between development and production publish.

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/60c6f47a-a547-3110-249a-e6adc199f...

Thanks

Resmi

[former_member197782]

Hi Sean,

As suggested by Steve, I would also suggest you use development publish when the app is in development mode i.e, you keep doing the changes / enchantments to the app.

Development Publish: (DEV Environment)

With the development app publish you can easily test the app by publishing the Agentry app definitions / deploying the java jar files in development server java folder (Easy Copy / Paste mechanism).

Once these two steps are done, you just need to restart SMP Service and test the functionality in device.

Main point of development publish is there is version of app. So you can publish the definitions in to server and there is no much burden on memory consumption.

So you can do N no.of trails with your app and you can publish the app into server as many times you want.

Test app in device N no.of times.

Once the development is completed and done with proper testing in DEV , I would suggest you to use the prod publish.

Production publish: (Quality, Pre-Prod & PROD)

It is recommendation from my side to do the production publish once the development is completed and you are confident on the customization / enhancements done.

I would also recommend you to do the prod publish, once the app is tested thoroughly in DEV environment.

Because, for prod app we have to do the ZIP file with agentry app definitions, java jar files and other server configuration files.

The Agentry.ini file is deprecated in Agentry prod publish and you could not modify any of the server configuration files directly. All the files have been updated by internal SMP DB.

So whenever you want to do the changes to Agentry.ini / JavaBE.ini, the files need to be re zipped and redeployed into server.

In prod, it is recommended to maintain 3 versions due to out of memory issues.

Whenever, you are publish the new agentry definitions, new app version is created based on the changes done to the app (Major / Minor / Modification).

Thanks & Regards,

Roopa M

[sean_durr1]

Roopa / Stephen, thanks for the information provided so far.

In relation to the Development Publish, my laptop does not currently have o/s access to the Development SMP 3.0 server running the Work Manager application, so the only option I currently have is to use Agentry Editor to do the Development Publish 'locally' to my laptop.

Will I then just be able to get the exported files copied over to the Development SMP 3.0 server and restart SMP, or am I missing something?

Also, moving forward to when we have a QA and Production SMP environment, I am conscious of best practise for change management around development of Agentry apps, especially tracking of multiple changes to the same app etc. so any advice on this would also be appreciated, e.g. use of shared workspaces and/or tools for checking in / out apps in order to restrict who can make changes at any one time.

[sravanthi_polu]

Hi Sean,

There is a concept called "Team Configuration" in Agentry when multiple developers are working on a single application.Hope this might also be applicable in SMP.

Please check the below link for further information.

SyBooks Online

Thanks & Regards,

Sravanthi Polu

[bill_froelich]

Sean,

When developing, most of the time developers run a local SMP server.  That way they can publish to the local server directly on our machines, start / restart as needed, etc.  Once you are done with a change, then publish a production version locally and upload to a shared server for additional development testing before moving to QA/Prod.

If you have multiple developers, all developers would have their own server instances and then merge into the master copy (teamshare or manual merge) before publishing the latest master to the development integration sever for testing.

--Bill

[Former Member]

For QA and Production it is recommended to use Production Publish,  For Development use Development.

The reason for this is because development doesn't use version control.  As in development, you will be publishing often the versions on the server would just build up.  Each version is loaded into the memory and you would need to keep removing version off the server else it would run out of memory.

For QA and Production, you will want to use Production as it will give you the ability to do version control.  This way the users will only download the changes that are needed between the version they have and the newest on the server.  Also, it gives the ability to do clustering (no possible with dev logic).  Also, the version that go to QA\Prod isn't only after development is done.