CA Gen integration with Jenkins

[Tarek Kamal]

Hi all;
this document 

CA Gen Integration 

did before by Christian Kersters

I reposted again may any cline can use it and give his feedback 

Gen Need more and more investigation on the DevOps 

CA Gen Integration
Building CA Gen code through Jenkins
Christian Kersters



------------------------------
Tarek Kamal
------------------------------

[Kim Peelman]

Hi All! You may have difficulties with the link in the original post. Tarek has shared the original PDF with me, so I'm attaching it to this thread. I hope you find it valuable. 

@Tarek Kamal Thanks for sharing! ​

------------------------------
Kim Peelman
[e-mail]
Product Owner, Gen
Broadcom
Plano, TX
------------------------------

Attachment(s)

CA Gen integration with Jenkins.pdf   228 KB 1 version

[Daniel Stratton]

I'd definitely agree that more DevOps is useful with respect to Gen - I suspect sites are building some of it out themselves.

The PDF is useful for some building blocks, though it's very CSE centric and reliant on old style batch files, however.  It feels more like CRUD level aspects rather than a business level implementation.  These days, I'd be using either a shell script (unix) or PowerShell (Windows) to make the script easier to write and invoke.

We have built out our own Jenkins pipeline separately as a higher level construct - multiple RMT support, binning them in appropriate order (cascade, opslibs, remainder) with separate build profiles each, and code signing and deployment.  But it also fits our specific needs too. Which, I guess, is what DevOps is all about.

[Tarek Kamal]

Hi Daniel,

Your feedback and experience are highly appreciated
Would you mind sharing more information about the process you took to implement automation on your site with Gen? 
All my applications target Java with HE on MVS 

[Daniel Stratton]

I'm somewhat constrained in what I can share, given it's internal work product and can form part of our services engagement. 

We're in a different boat - Windows/C/ODBC generation target with model stored in an HE.  So it's a bit different for us.  Generation is a weak point (HE doesn't do it for our target), so we have a process to pull down the models of interest and then we generate the RMTs.  We've considered child CSEs, but the handshaking isn't automated as yet, so it's the process we live with.

From there, they're thrown into a folder and we use a CSV to drive it.  LM name, build profile, extra data etc.  A Jenkins job takes a folder name, deployment target and the CSV file, triggers a Powershell script that reads and sorts the RMTs into appropriate build order based on inter-module dependencies (we have ops libs with cross-lib dependencies), and drives the build tool from the command line to do the splits and builds.  We then do code signing and other things as a followup, and deploy to the appropriate target.

Java is more problematic though - WAR/EAR stuff requires assembly, and to my knowledge there's no mechanism to trigger that from a command line build tool invocation, last I looked.  Lack of time has prevented me from looking further though.

[Tarek Kamal]

Hi Daniel,

Java might be more complicated, but we have the same problem when working with HE. 
My site doesn't use child CSEs but we built our tool on windows to run the generation using Gen server API in the "JMMI" folder after that running some scripts to update their files in WAR/EAR
I wonder why CA or Broadcom does not invest in new tools to help the customer manage the generation outside of HE 

In that regard, GuardIEn is one of the most powerful tools, but you should use CSE with Java instead of HE

[Daniel Stratton]

And this is the point I tap out - it's no longer just a discussion about CA Gen and it's native, universal capabilities for all.

End of the day, DevOps is a complicated puzzle, and nothing is a one size fits all - it's about having the right tools with the right flow to do the right job.

I think there's plenty Broadcom can do to help everyone, and there's certainly mechanisms in place to already make some use of it.

[Aldred Gonzalez]

Dont forget that IET GuardIEn now has a SOAP API (hence the latest version has been renamed to IET DevOps Suite) that you can utilise to drive builds and promotes through the environments ... (ability for a few years now) -- (Automated Model Management, Impact Analysis and Build  -- https://support.iet.co.uk/#EVENTS)

You should be able integrate this into a Jenkins pipeline. I was setting a demo up at some stage but never got around to it. But the ideas behind it should be similar to what I demoed years ago here -- https://community.broadcom.com/mainframesoftware/viewdocument/?DocumentKey=9eadc9d6-74c3-43d8-a500-183572f0b747&CommunityKey=4182c217-4789-4997-8f22-87de25983f6e&tab=librarydocuments

At DEWR we utilise Azure Devops - all the promotes from dev thru test are automated, and drops into the target environments scheduled a number of times a day (due to c# / com+ limitations). Mostly scheduled due to the sharing of a common model (only one for most of the app)  - but nothing to say you cant come up with strategies to introduce some CI/CD into your environment.