📄️ DTAP arrangement and environments
When you develop a USoft application, you typically keep versions of the application in multiple environments. An environment is a physical computer, or a virtual machine acting as a physical computer, where USoft has been installed and where application deliverables are built or have been copied to.
📄️ Folder paths and file paths
In many places in Delivery Manager, you must specify where folders and files are located on the file system. All folder paths and file paths must meet the following conditions:
📄️ Special folders
Delivery Manager distinguishes a number of folders that have a special purpose. This applies only after you initialise a release tree.
📄️ Folder management principles
To make your work easier and less error-prone, at certain times Delivery Manager automatically refreshes folders in the file system.
📄️ Running from flat files or repository
In each environment, you run your USoft application(s) for a specific purpose: Test, Acceptance, Production, Sales Demo, Prototype, Tutorial, Classroom Course...
📄️ Best-practice task design
Task design is the activity of finding out what is the optimal sequence of DTAP actions that you want Delivery Manager to perform.
📄️ Upgrade
Upgrade is the operation whereby, on a target machine, the previous release version of your USoft application is replaced by the current (on the target machine, the "next") release version.
📄️ Stashing
Stashing is the process of making a safe temporary copy of production data that is in danger of getting lost during upgrade. Before the upgrade, you stash the data. After the upgrade, you re-import it in a different form. Delivery Manager proposes a standard way of implementing "stashing", which is to export the data to an XML file in a pre-upgrade script (using INVOKE XML.EXPORT), then to change its name or form (or both) by applying an XSLT transformation, and then to re-import the data from XML in a post-upgrade script (using INVOKE XML.IMPORT):