New to Clarity: How to deploy portlets from test to production?

[Anon Anon]

I am a new Clarity dev. As background, I am a C#/ASP.NET developer who has been put into Clarity development (no Java experience but plenty of years on Windows development, web, javascript, html, xml, et al).

We have a test environment and a production environment with Clarity PPM v12.0.5 in our organization. I am learning how to develop new portlets and apps into Clarity. I created a portlet with some tabs, and am currently adding queries and learning how to produce the reports management requested.

The question I have is, once I am done and everything is tested and approved, how do I deploy all of this new functionality to the production environment? In .NET it is easy, just compile and "Publish" the file to a folder, then copy over to the other environment. In Clarity, I guess it is more complicated. I suppose the pages/tabs/portlets I create 'live" inside a database table or three. Is there any way, or accepted procedure to replicate all of this work into production?

Surely I'm not suppossed to re-create everything by hand in the other server, am I?

Is there some documentation or online tutorial that shows you how to do this?

I am sure the expert users here have gone through this many times over.

Thanks,

Alex Feldstein
Ryder Systems

[Anon Anon]

Hi Alex,
First, welcome to Clarity development. In general, there are two ways to migrate "codes" within Clarity environments: XOG or manual re-entry. For your examples, you can XOG out the "codes" for your portlet and then XOG it in to anothe environment. Some drawbacks with XOG are quirky dependencies which often deliver unintended consequences. If you are familiar with XML - you can read through the XOG file to eliminate some of this quirkiness. The second method is to just manully re-enter your configuration in the new environment via cut and paste. I have heard people who'd attempted to use a screen scripting tool to do migration also - not sure how successful that is. At our company - we generally manually make the migration as that take the least amount of time and provides us with the highest success rate.

[Deactivated User]

You read it out with XOG using portlets_read.xml from dev and write back the output to prod.
Download the XOG client from the server or take it from webroot directory.
Install the client and do the read.
See the integration guide for some details.

Martti K.

[Anon Anon]

Thanks for both of your quick responses.

I was afraid that doing it manually was an option. In this rather small page I'm creating (my first), it is certainly doable. In a longer/bigger project it sounds as archaic as it could be (and I though we were in the 21st century B)).

The XOG import-export sounds promising. I have not delved into XOG yet. I worked with XML and SOAP/WSDL generators for years so it should not be that difficult.

The previous dev left and did not leave much for me to follow. Documentation is sparse at best. I looked into the test server and saw a folder called IDEAXOG with subfolders. One called .\xml contains many xml files. There is a portlets_read.xml and a portlets_write.xml which I assume are the ones you were referring to.

Sorry for all the newbie questions but that's were we all started, isn't it?

[Update]: Delving into the windows folders I found this in the server:

.\niku\clarity\webroot\XOG\
It has XOG.EXE and xogclient.zip

I assume these are the ones you referred to. Thanks. Will unzip this in my local drive and see what's what. Thanks.

[Deactivated User]

Please find attached a simple instruction for the XOG client from a couple of years back.
You can search this forum and LinkedIn groups for more info. Like what can be considered automation and
Data Migration Opinions?
I find XOG fairly reliable in the areas I've used it which migrating items from one environment to another and to enter initial data when that is more than 20 records.

Martti K.

Attachment(s)

XOG INSTRUCTIONS.pdf   59 KB 1 version

[Anon Anon]

+1 from me on the XOG the portlet out of DEV, XOG it into TEST/PROD etc method; been doing just that for years.  (Albeit with a little bit of XML editting to remove the "junk")

This method also gives you a nice flat XML file that you can then put into your source control system, which is always a good idea! :-)

--

@alex - you don't actually need to go searching around on the server for the XOG install file - if you give your self the right "software download" as an admin user in Clarity you should see a "General Settings" / "Client Downloads" link in the ADMIN menu system - you can get it from there (this just links to the installer file). NOte that the cross-platform installer is the xogclient.zip, the windows installer is just XOG.exe)

[Anon Anon]

Thank you. That's good informaiton. Making it easier to post to source control is always a good thing!