You’ve followed the recipe to the letter…only to discover you’re out of propane for the barbecue.
You brush and floss just like you’re supposed to….but the dentist tells you you have a cavity anyway.
You’ve conducted your workflow development with as much rigor and care as humanly possible…but your configuration update fails to apply.
Sometimes things just don’t go your way. This is true with all things and, when it happens, it often leaves you scratching your head. When it comes to failed Configuration Updates, it’s sometimes difficult to figure out what went wrong, but there are some common pitfalls that affect everyone eventually. I’ll discuss a few of the more common ones with the hope that you are one of the fortunate ones who can avoid pain by learning from the experiences of others.
Pitfall #1: Developing directly on Production
The whole premise of the SDLC is that development only takes place in the development environment, and no where else. While this sounds simple, it’s a policy frequently broken. Workflow configuration is a rich network of related objects. Every time you define a relationship through a property that is either an entity reference or a set, you extend the “object network”. In fact, your entire configuration is really an extension of the core object network provided by the Extranet product.
The Extranet platform is designed from the ground up to manage this network, but its world is scoped to a single instance of a store. The runtime is not, and in the case of the SDLC, should not be aware of other environments. This means that it can make no assumptions about objects that exist in the store to which the configuration update is applied. It must assume that the object network in development reflects the object network in staging and production. Because of this, it’s trivially easy to violate this assumption by configuring workflow directly on production. If that’s done, all assumptions that the state of production reflects the state of development at the time the current round of development began are incorrect and the Configuration Update is likely to fail.
Errors in the Patch Log that indicate you may be a victim of this pitfall will often refer to an inability to find entities or establish references.
One common cause for such an error is when you add a user to the development store but there is no corresponding user with the same user ID on production. Some objects include a reference to their owner. In the case of Saved Searches, for example, the owner will be the developer that created the saved search. In order to successfully install the new saved search on the target store, that same user must also exist there.
Troubleshooting this type of problem is tedious and sometimes tricky because it’s often necessary to unravel a portion of the object network. It’s a good idea to do whatever you can to avoid the problem in the first place when you can.
Bottom Line: Only implement your workflow on the development store and make sure that all developers have user accounts on development and production (TIP: You don’t need to make them Site Managers on production).
Pitfall #2: Not applying the update as a Site Manager
If your update fails to apply and you see a message that has this in the log entry:
Only the room owner(s) can edit this information.
you are probably not specifying the credentials for a site manager account when Applying the Update.
This can happen when a user is not provided in the Apply Update command via the Administration Manager or if the provided user is not a Site Manager. The installation of new or updated Page Templates causes edit permissions checks for each component on the page template and unless the active user is a Site Manager those checks will likely fail.
Bottom Line: Always specify a site manager user when applying a Configuration Update. Technically this isn’t always required depending upon the contents of the Configuration Update, but it’s easy to do so make a habit of doing it every time.
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More pitfall avoidance tips next time….
Cheers!
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