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Ben Spead · Apr 25, 2018

Also, Classes lend themselves much better to programmatic access and manipulation of their content (you can do this with routines too but it is harder to do so due to their unstructured nature).

For example, the server-side Source Control hooks we use can programmatically insert an RCS Keyword as a class parameter ("SrcVer") into any class which doesn't already have it defined.   This is extremely powerful because it allows source control to create an automatic 'watermark' in every class created for our internal applications which can be programmatically access or from terminal:

SSO>write ##class(AppS.WebClient).#SrcVer
$Id: //custom_ccrs/us/ISCX/SSO/BASE/cls/AppS/WebClient.xml#6 $

This would require much more plumbing to do automatically with a routine!

Ben Spead · Apr 24, 2018

Kumar,

It sounds like you are trying to use Atelier with client-side source control hooks against a shared development instance - is this correct?  If so, you are bound to experience frustration with this due to consistency issues.

Please review https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?id=713 which discussed the 4 modes of development, which are to be avoided, and options available to you in a summary graphic from the training:

If you are going to be using Atelier with client-side hooks, I *strongly* recommend you move to giving each developer their own private instance to test against.

Ben Spead · Apr 20, 2018

Kumar,

If you are using CCR then there are very specific  requirements in terms of development workflow which will provide assurances of no source loss, etc.  Please open a ticket with Support to discuss these specific concerns and considerations.

In summary, there can only be a single Disconnected BASE environments for each System, because the CCR Client Tools manage source concurrency within the Namespace, and if you have multiple BASE namespaces you have lost concurrency and therefore can lose source.  Atelier will work the same as Studio - you need a single Shared Dev Namespace using the CCR Client Tools (aka server-side source hooks) and at that point you can use either Atelier or Studio to edit the source in BASE.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Server-side hooks will only work properly with Atelier if you are running a database version that includes CDS2924.  This is included in 2016.2.3+, 2017.1.2+ and 2017.2.0+ only.  If you are not sure if you have CDS2924 or not, please contact Support (if you use Atelier against a Shared Dev instance that doesn't have CDS2924 you don't have concurrency and therefore can lose source).

Hope that helps to get you started in the right direction :)

Ben Spead · Mar 8, 2018

You would also need to be careful of the following:

  •  integration endpoints (e.g. web service calls (especially those inserting data), POP3 mailbox retrieval, FTP fetches, etc)
  •  email generation code in your app
  •  task schedule
  •  NFS mount points

You must be very careful that your non-production instances do not behave as production post-cloning (e.g. you would never want a test system generating emails to non-developers).  We have all of our code-base instrumented so that with a single configuration global we can control production vs non-production behavior (including where to go for web service calls, etc).  This allows us to have identical code across all environments, but only Prod will send email, fetch actual user files, insert real data into other systems, etc.  We then have our application-specific configuration globals mapped to their own Config DB, which means:

  • when the Data DB is restored from LIVE it doesn't bring configuration data with it (i.e. we need to avoid a Test system suddenly thinking it is Prod because the global indicating Dev|Test|Prod is restored from Prod)
  • when we run a test build for CI on our Build servers (also cloned from Prod) we can start with an empty Code DB (and pre-populated Data and Config DBs) and everything "just works" :)

Glad to hear that you are already virtualized - that can really save you a lot of setup and config time.  Let me know if you have any additional questions :)

(P.S. Chris, welcome to the world of Caché and DeepSee!!  I hope you find the Community to be helpful.

note - if you are happy with this answer, please mark the Answer as Accepted so this thread falls off of the Unanswered Questions list)

Ben Spead · Mar 8, 2018

For my team we always deploy on VMs, which makes it trivial to clone the VM to create our Dev and Test instances (this helps ensure complete equivalent for all Caché settings, OS patch level, OS settings, etc).  When we moved to this approach it really helped to improve our testing stability and predictability (we have our Code and Data separated into different DB, so the Code DB is updated from source control and our Data DB can be updated weekly with restoring the backup of the Prod Data DB.

If you are currently deployed on bare iron this won't be an option for you.  But if you are virtualized for production (or can move to it in the future) you may find that it saves a lot of hassle for your Dev and Test instances.

Ben Spead · Mar 6, 2018

Alexey,

The post you referred to was with respect to license key changes - I didn't see any guarantees that a previous non-Ubuntu installs would be upgradable (in fact I would be surprised if they were).

I suggest you contact the WRC for final confirmation, but I expect you'll need to start with a fresh instance and move over your code, config and data.

Ben

Ben Spead · Jan 25, 2018

Geoffroy,

Welcome to Caché!  

Moving a database is really straightforward:

  1. Find the database definition in your 2007.1 instance in the System Management Portal
  2. Note the physical Directory where the cache.dat is located
  3. Shut down Caché and make a copy of the cache.dat file located in that Directory
  4. On your 2017.1 instance create a new database definition in the System Management Portal an point the Directory to the location of the copy of the cache.dat that you copied from your 2007.1 instance

Hope that helps!

Ben

Ben Spead · Jan 19, 2018

See this thread which discusses several options for server-side Studio hooks for Git:

https://community.intersystems.com/post/are-there-server-side-git-studio...

NOTE - in my use-case I was looking for server-side hooks in order to allow concurrent server-based development, and I discovered that Git is very poorly suited for that purpose.  I ended up abandoning Git and using Perforce instead for my demo (Perforce is very well suited for server-side hooks with concurrent server-based development).  If you are you already operating in a single-developer / single instance setup and if you can move to one of the very latest versions of the product (2017.2.0+ or 2017.1.2+) then you should take a look at Atelier with client-side source control hooks.

For a thorough review of the different development models (private instance vs shared instance) and the different source control hook approaches (client-side vs server-side), I highly recommend that you watch the following session from last year' Global Summit:

https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?id=713

Ben Spead · Jan 4, 2018

Stephen,

An advantage to this is that the WRC will have a history of snapshots of your config and some basic operating data so that if you need to contact them about a performance issue, behavior change, etc, they could look back and see changes which have taken place in your system that might impact current behavior.  

Several large customers take advantage of this to make it easier to see trends in their instances.

HTH,

Ben

Ben Spead · Dec 9, 2017

Hats off to you Sean!  You did a great job pulling all of this together!

Not sure if it is worth listing or not, but here is an *ancient* open source app written in Caché which may still be interesting to some people:

http://onforme.sourceforge.net/

https://sourceforge.net/projects/onforme/ 

(not guarantees that it will work out of the box with current versions of Caché ;) )