Task 6: Upgrade Your Development Environment (Repeated)

When performing a skip-level upgrade, you must repeat Task 6 once for each stop in the upgrade path.

Perform Steps 1–14 as described in Task 6: Upgrade Your Development Environment for each Identity Manager product version to which you must upgrade to reach your Identity Manager target version.

Of these steps, only Step 9: Analyze the Changes must be significantly enhanced for a skip-level upgrade. See Step 9: Analyze the Changes for a Skip-Level Upgrade for the enhanced instructions.

Step 9: Analyze the Changes for a Skip-Level Upgrade

You must analyze the changes made by the Identity Manager product upgrade.

As you iteratively upgrade your Development environment, you iteratively update the baseline for your Identity Manager application, including the following:

• Configuration objects

• JSP files

• Identity Manager product JARs

• Third-party JARs

Your baseline must also include SQL scripts to create or update database tables and a subset of update.xml to update repository objects that are not included in your baseline.

Each iteration that includes a sample database table upgrade script requires changes to your overall upgrade procedure. You can run the database table upgrade scripts in the correct order or concatenate the scripts, but you must modify each sample script appropriately for your environment.

You might find that it is more convenient, more efficient, and ultimately safer to write a single database table upgrade script that is cumulative. In other words, write a single script that combines all of the processing that would have been done by each of the individual database table upgrade scripts if you executed those scripts in the proper order.

Executing a single database upgrade script simplifies the upgrade procedure and gives you the opportunity of eliminating redundant processing, such as creating indexes for one version of Identity Manager and then later dropping and re-creating the same indexes for another version of Identity Manager.

You can also identify an appropriate subset of the Identity Manager update.xml in each iteration that is required to update objects in the Identity Manager repository that are not managed as part of the baseline. For a skip-level upgrade, you must ensure that this subset of the Identity Manager update.xml is cumulative.

If you are developing a skip-level upgrade, you must be sure to add any configuration objects that were changed by an updater to your Identity Manager baseline.

An updater is a program supplied with Identity Manager that updates configuration objects. The updater is invoked by an ImportCommand within update.xml or within a file that update.xml includes. An updater generally works only with the version of Identity Manager with which it was shipped. Because you are writing a “skip-level” upgrade, the updater probably will not work with the target version of Identity Manager. Adding any changed configuration object to your baseline is by far the safest approach.