managing config files in TS

Just curious. I am managing all of our config files in TeamSite. So I have a workflow that deploys from the config branch to $IW-HOME. Works great when people are used to editing the files by hand.

The rub comes when you use the admin gui, open deploy gui, WFB, etc. Since these programs look only in the "approved" areas (typically under $IW-HOME) they will not edit the versioned files, rahter they edit the deployed files.

Since one would think Interwoven would encourage people to version & workflow important config files, how do people reconcile this ?

What do others do ? John, Smitty, Fish you guys must have addressed this before.

No GUIs allowed works for me :-)

Andy

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Migrateduser

We used to use TeamSite to manage our config files (available_templates, roles files, etc.) when we ran TS 4.2.1. Once we upgraded to 5.5.2 we didn't put any TeamSite configs into TeamSite. I think we toyed with the idea, and still might do it - we just didn't yet. But when we had the configs under TeamSite control, I would always get caught editing the files in a Unix shell (not through TeamSite) and have to go back and edit them again in TeamSite to make it right. I'm just used to editing things manually using vi in a shell. It's just something that was hard for me to adjust to. Because of the Admin GUI, I don't need to mess with roles files at all, which is nice. It probably would be good to keep available_templates and some other config files under some kind of version control, though. I don't really have a solution to your problem, I just thought I would reply since you asked.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Migrateduser

I mark the files as readonly in IWHOME. It doesn't always stop people from making changes, but it is at least an annoyance/reminder. Of course when you patch or upgrade TeamSite (or even just install FrontOffice, etc.) this can be a problem as it tries to write to them directly. I have a custom menu item rather than a workflow, but we have been considering changing to workflow. For Perl scripts the CMI also runs iwperl -c and disallows save if there is a compile error, and validates XML (config) files. It also forces them to use our metadata capture template to enter information about the purpose of the file (same as for documentation), and these DCRs are used to generate an HTML index of the files. I recently put out a version of this code that should be generic enough to work in almost any environment if anyone is interested (another thing that should be part of the base product if you ask me). There are some issues with my code but it basically works.

Having all the code in a branch also makes it easy to migrate configuration/custom build from one server to another.

I say no admin GUI. I can justify this on a number of grounds such as that it doesn't support LDAP for UID and it doesn't version files.

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nipper

Thanks

John your solutions sounds pretty good, esp the metadata capture for comments. I will, of course have to change that to exempt myself, but hey, what good is a double standard if I cannot use it.

Please post any code you have.

Do you see any reason to version roles files ? I am with Smitty there, but I also have a custom CGI to add users to Unix and then to the roles files, so pointing that to the versioned files (& then kicking off a workflow) would not be rocket science.

Andy

Thanks

Migrateduser

I think it needs a little work before I post it here so I sent it to the email address listed in your profile. Also I figured nobody else would want the metadata capture part so I had taken that out (it still requires a submit comment), I think it might be org-specific (I can send the original if you are interested).

We version the .UID files just so we can tell who made what changes when. I could see for licensing compliance that some organizations might require this.

Maybe someone from Interwoven will chime in and say all of this is built into the next release anyway?

Edited by john on 04/15/03 11:00 AM (server time).

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