"Preserve During Clone" Update Set

[Jim Coyne]

Part of the Developer Toolbox Series.  Available as a separate Update Set on Share.

Adds a new "True/False" field called "Preserve during clone" to the following tables:

• Application Menu
• Module
• User
• Group

Used by Clone Data Preserver records (included) in order to save the version of a record in sub-production instances, such as instance-specific Application or Modules (e.g. deactivate the "StartNow" Application in dev instance). You can leverage the dot-walking ability to save records where a Reference field is marked to be preserved, such as the Group role table, where the condition looks at the Preserve on Clone field on the Group Reference field.

The "update_exempt=true" attribute is added to the new fields (on appropriate tables only) in order to continue receiving any updates to the records during an upgrade, as long as no other tracked field has been changed.

Access Control rules have been added so only users with the "admin" role can see the fields (only on the appropriate tables).

You will probably NOT want to save the record in an Update Set when changing the "Preserve during clone" field on a record in one of the above tables, as it should be instance-specific.  Depends on the situation.

One example of how I use it is I always create Modules for each of the Update Sources:

Obviously, I don't want all of them active in each of the instances, so I'll create the Modules, all set to inactive AND with the "Preserve during clone" field checked, in an Update Set and move it all the way to Production.  Along the way, as I'm committing the Update Set, I will manually change the appropriate Module to active so only the proper Module appears in that instance.

So for instance, they are all left inactive in Dev because we won't be pulling in any Update Sets from another instance there, but in DevTest, I'll set the "Update Source - Dev" Module active so we can pull in Update Set from Dev into DevTest and so on up the line of instances.

The Update Set is available here on the Share site.