Deployment automation between Environments

[midnite80]

All,

Hope you can help....

I have two environments DEV and Test and i have been task with the automation of the application deployments between these.

Basically we want our planning developers to run a script, macro or a job in the development environment that simply does a export of the model from CAC and then places the export file into a shared deployment location and then have the test environment to pick this file up and deploy the application to the test environment.

This is easy to do with macros but we have a requirement for this to be totally automated no user or developer interaction other than clicking a button :)...  As normal there is nothing on the old GOOGLE knowledge base...

Hope I have explained my self cleanly....

Many Thanks
Rich

[ericlfg]

Hi Midnite,

You, I believe, could accomplish this.  You would need to be on a version >= to 8.4 I believe.

1. Setup a shared UNC path in both environments for the target deployment location.  You would do this at the top of the 'Environment page' in cognos configuration for both environments.
2. In the CAC of the target environment run a deployment export (model and data) for the application you want to export.  This will put the deployment folder on the unc share you created in step one.
3. Go to the Macro section and create a new macro.  The macro step you'll be looking for is Run Deployment.
4. In the setup of this step, select the name of the export you created in step two.  Click Validate and then OK.
5. You can now run this macro through the epMacroExecutor.exe located in <install_directory>\bin\ (usually, C:\program files\ibm\cognos\c*\bin (where * is the version you're on, usually 8, or 10)). 
*Note:  You have 2 options for scheduling.  You can use cognos connection and setup a schedule to run this specific macro, or you could use the above command line and put it into a .bat / .cmd and schedule it through windows scheduler.  If you want to be able to manually run only 1 script to trigger first the export, then the import, you may have to involve your IT group to help with setting up epMacroExecutor script to be triggered on a remote system.
6. On the target (import) system, you'll run a deployment import and select the package we exported in step 2.
7. Repeat steps 3 through 5 above.

So, this should give you the ability to schedule the import / export in your environment, and as I said, if you need to be able to manually run the export / import by running a single script, you would likely want to seek the aid of your IT group.  There are a couple of options to trigger a script to run remotely.

[jeffowentn]

Since we have separate LDAP/Access Manager instances between DEV and PROD, there is a known defect for 8.4.1 that sometimes causes the security mappings not to work properly, particularly with the Analyst libraries.  Does anyone know how this is handled?  I suspect this would prevent us from automating these steps, although it sounds very nice.