Application Dependency Validation and Generating App Migration Checklist

In this article, we will discuss about a feature has been in a great demand by a many application developers for a really long time. AgilePoint NX already provides you a one click packaging of your app and its related artifacts like Process Models, Forms, images, JavaScript, CSS, Access Tokens, App specific configuration. However, an application can depend on shared components, which are used across multiple applications. Packaging the shared components and moving it automatically with the app can have undesired side-effects as it might break some other App Designer’s apps without his knowledge and hence should be done carefully.

These shared artifacts could include:

1. Data entities.
2. Pick lists.
3. Groups
4. Roles
5. Global Access Tokens.
6. File Types Groups
7. Predefined Lists
8. Translation Languages
9. Validation Masks

This feature resolves the following challenges:

1. On the system where the application has been developed, the person who is exporting, may not be aware about which shared resources are being referenced in the app.
2. On the system where the application has to be imported, the person who is importing the app, may not know about the additional dependencies and might struggle to figure out why the application is not working post import.

Going forward, during the application import we will be doing an automatic validation and the person importing will see a report on what shared resources are missing in the target server. Using this report, these missing dependencies issues can be resolved. Moreover, before exporting, there is an option to view/print/save report of the shared resources being referenced in the app, so that it can be used as an app migration checklist.

Please note that this feature is only available for apps which are packaged using AgilePoint NX v8.0 and beyond. If you exported an app from an older environment and are importing it into AgilePoint NX v8.0, it will not perform any validation for shared resources since the shared resource list won’t be packaged with the app itself as this feature was not available in older version of AgilePoint. However the next time you export app from AgilePoint NX v8.0, the package will include the dependency list. This usually won’t be the case as your development and QA environments are upgraded before the production environment so most likely you will never move an app from older version to newer version.

To know more about the application dependency checker, please watch the following video.