Spar based deployment

System

Hello All

I am trying to move the pages, templates, dcrs and related assets from one environment to another using spar. I have referred to the SP_user_guide that details the procedure.

The files have been copied successfully to the respective workarea folders. However, I find that the files have not been submitted (templates, dcrs, pages and all the other related files). The log file says successful submit, though...

My questions to the forum are

1. What could be the problem for the non-submission of files?

2. Is the install_archive.ipl supposed to "get latest" and update all the pages as well? I had run the ant script to set the current version to 1 (as given in the guide) and expected the spar script to automatically update the latest templates and components in the deployed environment. But when I open the pages after running the spar, livesite is asking me to get latest!

Please let me know.

Regards

Rick Poulin

1. What could be the problem for the non-submission of files?

The templates and components should be submitted by the process and I'd expect an error message in the install_sparname.log if that's not the case. However, the contents of your workarea are "content", not "code", so they rightly are not submitted by the process. The install_archive doesn't deploy your site to the runtime for you, so whatever process you use for that (e.g. PLC workflow) is what should be doing the submit.

2. Is the install_archive.ipl supposed to "get latest" and update all the pages as well? I had run the ant script to set the current version to 1 (as given in the guide) and expected the spar script to automatically update the latest templates and components in the deployed environment. But when I open the pages after running the spar, livesite is asking me to get latest!

I think you misunderstood the purpose of setting the version numbers to 1 (should be 0 actually, AFAIK). The install_archive process doesn't know (read: doesn't bother to check) what the new component/template versions might be. All it knows is that if you leave them to the previous server's values, they'll almost certainly be wrong. By setting them to 1, you're telling SitePub that no matter what, consider the component/template to be out of date JUST IN CASE it might be. Certainly, you're trying to avoid having a version number that is many times what it really is, which would cause the page not to notice component updates until the version catches up to what's recorded in the page.

You have two options here. The easiest is this: after installing your spar, go into your site and use SitePublisher > Get Latest Components and select "update" for all. The process should not change your components, it'll merely set the version number to what it should be. If you want to avoid this manual step, you'll have to write a script that checks the components/templates branch, figures out the version numbers of those files, and then update all your templates/pages with the correct version number.