Urgent problem: Deployment of Admin Links

[sascha]

Hi guys

we are just setting up a deployment package that consists of applications and admin links. Within the deployment we are struggeling very hard with the admin links.

Please think of the following situation

• We have two productive applications connected with one admin link inbetween.
• The deployment shall update only one of the applications as well as the admin link.
• The second application may not be part of the deployment import as this could potentially overwrite user data (as of changing Analyst dLists IIDs)
• The deployment will import the admin link. But as it's target (second app) is not part of the package the link will not be imported correctly.
• If you then open up the link step the admin console prompts me to set the "missing" application.

The described scenario does not sound too complicated as this is only a very small example. In reality this scenario contains over many hundred admin links (please no advices about this fact; I know that this shouldn't be; I just entered the project and will care about this later).

To facilitate this deployment I already thought about "cheating" with the deployment package (as you can do with exported macros) but the admin link definition is stored as an encoded xml file which is not readable. Also trying to manipulate the link definition on database side will result in just finding encoded binary values  >:(.

What seems to work is to export an admin link, change the cal definition by a text editor and reimport the definition. This could be a way but unfortunately there is no macro to automatically export and import admin links. So we would need to import each admin link manually.

What are you experiences? Any ideas of how to automate this? Ideas of decoding XML definition files?

Any help is highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Sascha

[SomeClown]

Was the second app created/updated using a deployment package?  Almost sounds like the appid is different, in which case you always have this problem.

As an experiment or test, have you tried rebuild development apps from packages exported in production, overriding whatever is there?  Then, re-importing links?

I'm asking only because as practice, I export admin links in separate packages and have not had the problems that you describe (they import correctly without a need to fix the reference).

[sascha]

Thanks for your reply. I think I forgot to mention something important. The deployment package is kind of a template with we are going to import for 80 different clients. Therefore we are going to rename the apps when importing the package using prefices.
So the admin link has app xxx as source, that will be imported during the deployment as abc_xxx. The target of the link is yyy but this app doesn't get imported. So the link is not automatically updated to abc_yyy and needs the manual adjustments.
That's why we are looking for a trick to swith the admin link targets "semi-automatically" as we can't import the target app from the template package (as of data loss).