Change Management Extract Interface

WebFOCUS Online Help > Change Management > Change Management Extract Interface

How to:

Access and Use the Change Management Extract Interface

Reference:

Extracting Repository Metadata

Many organizations do not grant Developers write access to the user acceptance test and production environments. Access to these environments is controlled and granted only to Administrators and/or automated change management processes. Yet only Developers know which changes are ready to be moved into test. The Change Management Extract Interface presents Developers with a graphical view of the Managed Reporting domains they manage and allows them to build a change package. This package is then loaded into another environment by the Change Management Load Program.

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Procedure: How to Access and Use the Change Management Extract Interface

  1. Go to the WebFOCUS Welcome Page: 

    http://hostname/ibi_apps/
  2. Click the Managed Reporting Change Management link.

  3. Type your Managed Reporting user ID and password and click Logon.

    The Change Management Extract Interface loads and displays the Domains to which the Developer or Administrator has access.

    The following image shows the Change Management Extract Interface for Administrators displaying the Domain Tree pane on the left and File List panel on the right. Option buttons appear below the File List pane, Download File (default) and Save on Server. To select the change, choose either the Create the Change Package or Clear File List button.

    Note: The Extract Repository Metadata link only displays for Administrators.

  4. Expand the folders in the Domains Tree pane. You can select individual items from a domain or the contents of an entire domain for your change package.

    You can single-click (or drag and drop) one or more items from a domain, for example, Bookings. You can also select the domain's help and profile files.

    You can also double-click (or drag and drop) a domain, for example, Inventory, to conveniently select all the content from this domain. Properties of the domain, for example, its Server and/or Application Path, are not propagated by the change management process. Since it is not a complete clone of the original domain, a different icon is used to indicate that it is really a collection of the domain's content that is being moved.

    Each time you select an item or domain, it appears in the Selected Files and Domains list pane. Duplicate items or duplicate domains are only added to the change package once. You should not select both a domain and items from the same domain.

  5. To clear the Selected Files and Domains, click the Clear File List button.

  6. By default, the Download File option is selected. Click Create Change Package to download the change package to your browser. You will then have the option to open it or save it to local storage.

    Note: When you select the Save on Server option, a window opens that provides you with the name of the change package created on the server.

    The naming format for the change package is: YYYYMMDD_MRUSERID_HHMMSS.zip. The format is Java Zip (which is WinZip compatible). If you have WinZip installed locally, open the change package.

    The contents of the change package includes: the extracted file(s) and a cmRepos.xml document that contains metadata about the file(s) such as their internal references and properties as shown in the following image.

  7. You should consider whether you want Developers to download and email change packages to a coordinator, or create the packages on the Web server platform. Packages created on the server are written to install_dir/WebFOCUS71/utilities/cm/extract. You can change this location by editing the WebFOCUS deployment descriptor (web.xml) and changing the value of the context-parameter MRCMEXTRACTDIR. The directory specified by this setting must exist and be writable by the servlet container. You may wish to have Developers create the package on the server and also download and email them to a coordinator. This may help audit the change process since you have a record of the Developer's intent, but can load the packages from a controlled location.

    Note: To ensure that the contents of the change package have not been altered in any way, Information Builders recommends that you always load change packages that were created on the server.

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Reference: Extracting Repository Metadata

The Extract Repository Metadata link takes you to a pane where you can extract metadata from the Repository for analysis. Administrators can query the Repository for metadata from this page. This may be helpful in planning or debugging. For more information about the output generated from these options (Extract Users, Extract Roles, Extract Groups, Extract Domains, Extract Domains Contents), see Managed Reporting Extract Utility. To return to the Change Management Extract Interface, click Return to Change Package Window.

The following image shows the Extract Repository Metadata pane containing metadata information for Extract Roles.

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