Setting Up m-Power Applications to Handle Development & Production Data

 
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After developing applications, it makes good sense to promote these applications to a production environment. There are many documents that explain how to do that on this site. For example, Set up a production instance. However, this document covers something very different from just having a development and production instance. What this document will cover is what if you want to have your development instance run over Test data, and your production instance run over live data.

For this to be successful, the table structure between your test and production libraries must be identical.

Develop, test, and paint your application as you normally would. By default, your applications will use, at run time, the same library your table resided in at development time. Essentially, the library name is hard coded. However, we can change that option by doing the following:

Click the "Admin Menu". Then click "Dictionary Configuration", and click "Runtime Application Settings."

Your screen will now resemble this:

Change the "tablename_fmt" value from "Include library/schema name" to "Table name only".

Click "OK". Then click the Save button.

Now, at run time, your applications will not use the library you used at development time, but you must still specify a list of libraries for the application to attempt to use. This information can be found by clicking Admin, then click "Data Sources" under Global Settings.

If you are using the remote connection, be sure to make the following changes to the "AS400 DB2 Remote" portion of the text. Likewise, if you are running locally, be sure to change to the "AS400 DB2 local" connection.

Since we told the SQL statement to no longer use the library used at development, we must specify libraries to try to use. The library list works left to right, and if your table is not found in the first library, it will continue on the list until it finds the correct library.

To specify your library list:

For Local connections:

After the *LOCAL ; add libraries=LIBNAME1, LIBNAME2, LIBNAME3;

For Remote connections:

After the libraries=, add LIBNAME1, LIBNAME2, LIBNAME3

Where LIBNAME1, LIBNAME2, LIBNAME3, etc. is your list of TEST libraries.

Ex. jdbc:as400://101.10.101.010;naming=system;libraries=LIBRARY1,LIBRARY2,LIBRARY3

Click the Accept button. Restart Tomcat.

Now that we have your development environment set up, simply copy over all the necessary components to your production environment, making sure to change your libraries list to now reference production libraries.

Note: MS SQL users will need to use the word "databaseName" rather than "libraries" as syntax is set by each database vendor.
Note: AS/400 customers should also have the JDBC connection property 'naming=system' in their database URL, as shown in the example above.

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