Best Practices for Forms Process Testing and Production

posted on August 5, 2019

Hi Everyone,

Searches on this topic have yielded several Feature Requests, but I'm curious to know some of your best practices to work around current limitations.

Scenario:
Users request changes to an existing, complex Forms process.

We create a copy of the process and use the copy for development and testing.

Once testing is complete, we want to move this up to prod.

We can either publish the updated process with the existing URL and rename the previous URL, or manually make the changes to the existing prod process.

We can not unpublish the previous process due to instances currently running. Users monitoring specific business process then have to monitor the various iterations through the end of all instances.

Manually making the changes to update the existing prod process is time consuming and error-prone.

Looking forward to reading your perspectives! Thanks.

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replied on August 6, 2019 • Show version history

We have test and production environments, each with their own repository, LFS, Workflow, etc. With the web products, we have three environments, dev, test, and production. In this case, the dev and test environments both point to the same repository and LFS instance. We also have the test and production databases on different SQL Server instances.

Other than server names, all other settings are identical, so it's a simple matter of changing server names as we migrate work from one environment to the other. All of the URLs only need the server name changed between environments, but the production stuff is always updated in place.

For Forms, we export from from one environment and import it to either the up or down-level environment. The data sources are all named identically, even if they point to different databases under the hood. Generally, this works fairly well.

It's the same process with Workflows, made easier by the new migration feature in 10.4.

Sometimes, we'll have to briefcase a folder structure or templates around.

Obviously, for Web Access and Forms, there is only one instance per environment. However, for WebLink, since we have some fairly significant customization spread across about a dozen instances, we are working towards keeping the web files in source control and deploying via our continuous deployment pipeline.

Does this help?

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