Business requirement and solution

During an implementation, components are created or modified to contain all of the configuration information for the product. This greatly speeds up the installation and configuration processes needed during an implementation. It also ensures configurations are not missed between development, QA, test, and production environments.

For example, a target system will have an address different in the development environment than the one in production, even if they essentially represent the same integration. Without environment files, we would need to create separate data components for the same target in each environment, to account for these configuration discrepancies. This would make component sets challenging to keep track of, and any common configuration changes made in one environment’s component set would then need to be propagated to all other environment component sets. Tracking configuration changes that need to be applied to individual or all environment component sets becomes difficult to manage and would involve complicated change control procedures.

Environment files provide a solution to install components with the environment-specific configuration values (like target addresses, user class group membership criteria, extdb values, and so on). The specific configuration values applied depend on the environment file (development, QA, test, UAT, production) selected through the manage_components.py command before installing the components.