Updating A Deployed Application

During the lifetime of an application you, the developer may need to update a deployed application many times. Changes may vary from updating one row in a table, to adding new features that may involve new forms, stored procedures, help messages, popups, and so on. These could easily involve hundreds of rows.

The deployment process needs to be as streamlined as possible, with a minimal effect on the ongoing production use of the application.

This chapter describes the process of updating a deployed application, whether it is deployed as a development copy or as a run-time application. The process consists of the following three steps:

1. Identifying the Changes to be Deployed. You have made the changes in your development copy. Some of the changes (new forms or popups, for example); others (such as test data or environment settings specific to your development environment), you may not wish to deploy. Create a new Repository View to accomplish this.
2. Creating a Deployment Definition for the Upgrade. Use the Runtime Deployment Kit (RDK) to extract the set of changes as a package to be applied, as a new Deployment Definition.
3. Upgrading the Deployed Application. Run the RDKINSTALL stored procedure on the production copy, pointing to the folder containing the changes.

The rest of this chapter shows these steps in detail. We will extract and deploy all changes made in the development copy after a specified date, so that the development copy and the production copy will be synchronized.