Managing Content in the Staging and Production Environments

This section describes how to publish changed content to an authoring Assembler in a staging environment, and how to publish all Workbench content in a staging environment to a production environment.

You need to configure your staging environment so that changes to Workbench content are automatically published to a generational store whenever the Workbench user saves them. The saved changes are immediately visible in Preview mode upon a successful publish.

To configure your staging environment to publish content changes, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Assembler context file for your application, WEB-INF/assembler-context.xml

  2. Open assembler-context.xml and find the Administration services section of the file.

  3. Scroll down and edit the properties in the StoreFactory bean with values that are appropriate for your site.

    For example, the configurationPath should be the location where content is extracted to when you publish content. 

    <bean id="StoreFactory" class="com.endeca.infront.content.source.FileStoreFactory"
   init-method="init" destroy-method="destroy">
  <property name="configurationPath" value="${repository.configuration.path}"/>
<!-- The following section is needed only when you are working in an authoring environment. --> 
  <property name="isAuthoring" value="${preview.enabled}"/>
  <property name="appName" value="${workbench.app.name}" />
  <property name="host" value="${workbench.host}" />
  <property name="clientPort" value="${workbench.publishing.clientPort}"/>
  <property name="serverPort" value="${workbench.publishing.serverPort}"/>
</bean>

    Always set the value of the configurationPath property to the value of the authoringApplicationExportDirectory property of deployment-settings in the publish file in your exported content. If you change the value of the authoringApplicationExportDirectory property, be sure to set the value of the property to the changed value. For information about deployment-settings, see Public JSON Formats for deployment-settings.

    By default, the authoring application export directory is located at C:/Endeca/ToolsAndFrameworks/<version>/server/workspace/state/generation_data/<application name>. For example, the authoring application export directory for the Discover reference application is C:/Endeca/ToolsAndFrameworks/<version>/server/workspace/state/generation_data/Discover. The generation files in the directory have the following format: generation_<date-and-timestamp><current-time-in-milliseconds>.zip.

    Note

    The configurationPath needs to be a directory that Workbench can write to and the Assemblers can read from.

  4. Save and close the assembler-context.xml file.

  5. Open the WEB-INF/assembler.properties file for your authoring Assembler in a text editor.

  6. Set the preview.enabled setting to true, as follows: 

    . . .
preview.enabled=true 
user.state.ref=previewUserState
media.sources.ref=authoringMediaSources
repository.configuration.path=./generation_data/${workbench.app.name}
defaultSiteRootPath=/pages
. . .

    Note

    The repository.configuration.path property specifies the location to which content is published. This location is set when you run the deployment template to create the application.

  7. Save and close the file.

  8. Restart your Web application server. For Guided Search reference applications, this is controlled through the Endeca Tools Service.

Every update to an EAC application creates a new generation file. Over time, the number of files in the authoring application export directory can become quite large. Oracle recommends that you consolidate these generation files into a single generation file every night. Use the following command: 

<apps directory>/<application name>/control/runcommand.bat/sh IFCR deployContent “Authoring”

For example: 

/Endeca/Apps/Discover/control/runcommand.sh IFCR deployContent “Authoring”

When you run this command, it deletes the contents of the directory and regenerates generation.xml and a generation file. It consolidates all the existing generation files into the new single generation file. After deploying the application content, the command notifies the environment's content listeners such as the FileStoreFactory to process the new content.

To promote application content from a staging environment to a production environment, follow these steps:

  1. Open the file WEB-INF/assembler.properties in a text editor.

  2. Set the preview.enabled setting to false, as follows: 

    preview.enabled=false
user.state.ref=liveUserState
media.sources.ref=liveMediaSources
repository.configuration.path=./repository/${workbench.app.name}

    Note

    The repository.configuration.path property specifies the location to which content is promoted. This location is set when you run the deployment template to create the application.

  3. Save and close the file.

  4. Navigate to the Assembler context file for your application, WEB-INF/assembler-context.xml.

  5. Open assembler-context.xml and find the Administration services section of the file. For example, in the production environment for the Discovery Electronics application, the section looks like the following: 

    <!-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Administration Service ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -->
    <bean id="adminService" class="com.endeca.infront.assembler.servlet.admin.AdministrationService">
        <property name="storeFactory" ref="storeFactory"/>
    </bean>

  6. Scroll down and edit the properties in the storeFactory bean with values that are appropriate for your site.

    For example, the configurationPath should be the location to which content is extracted when you promote content. 

    <bean id="storeFactory" class="com.endeca.infront.content.source.FileStoreFactory" init-method="init">
        <property name="configurationPath" value="${repository.configuration.path}"/>
    </bean>

  7. Save and close the assembler-context.xml file.

  8. Restart your Web application server. For Guided Search reference applications, this is controlled through the Endeca Tools Service.

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