Promote Your Digital Customer Service Application to Other Instances

Here's the recommended approach for managing the lifecycle of your application from the development phase up through the publishing of your application.

Your Fusion Service instance is provisioned with a Non-Production and Production environment, with some customers also having additional non-production instances. With each of your Fusion Service instances a Visual Builder instance is provisioned. This means there is a distinct Visual Builder associated with your Non-Production and Production environments respectively. The Non-Production instance will also include a Visual Builder Studio instance, enabling you to use a Git repository and a dedicated development environment.

Note: In these steps you'll be using the Digital Customer Service application and Visual Builder.

These multiple instances allow development to occur in safe, independent environments, without affecting any production applications. We recommend that development is carried out in your Non-Production environment and promoted to Production only when ready. Additionally, if you have Development environments, these can be used to further segregate the phases of development and provide restricted, controlled access before promoting to the next.

When your Digital Customer Service application is ready to be promoted from the Non-Production or Development Visual Builder environment to the Production environment there are two options available. These options are described in the following topics.

Note: You should not promote to a new environment until you've performed all the steps listed in Chapter 3, Mandatory Setup Tasks.

Promote an Application Using Export and Import

You can export your Digital Customer Service application as an archive to your local system, and then import it to create a new visual application. You can use the import and export mechanism to share application sources and to move applications between instances.

When you export the application, you can choose whether you want the archive to include the data contained in the application's business objects. Some information, such as credentials for external REST end points, is removed when you export an application. This information must be provided after the archive is imported. The application archive can be imported to the required instance via the import tool. You can also replace an existing visual application's source files with content from an archived file using the Import command located in the Application menu.

Once you're done, you then set up the user role mappings.

Finally, stage and publish the application. If you're using a Vanity URL, then make sure you've followed the steps from Set Up Vanity URLs.

For instructions on the export and import framework, refer to Import and Export Visual Applications.

Perform Required Prerequisite Steps Before Promoting the Application Using Visual Builder Studio

If you're not already using Visual Builder Studio, then there a few steps required before you can start developing your new Digital Customer Service application.

Set up the required IDCS roles.
Get access to the Visual Builder instance.
Create a project for the Visual Application using the Digital Customer Service template.
Set up the development project

For instructions on these steps, refer to Set Up VB Studio for Developing Visual Applications.

Once you create a Digital Customer Service project using the Visual Application template, several artifacts are created for you:

A Git repository that contains the visual application's source code.
A Development environment that points to the Visual Builder development instance.
Optionally, a private workspace to edit the visual application in the Visual Builder Studio Designer.

Once your Digital Customer Service application is set up in Visual Builder Studio, it's possible to promote it to your production Visual Builder instance, or to any other instance. You can do this by using the Import Application from Visual Builder Studio Git option in Visual Builder.

Promote the Application Using a Git Repository

If your application is stored in a Git repository, then you can import it to the Production environment.

To do this, you first have to make the existing Git repository accessible to the production environment by doing the following:

Log into Visual Builder.
Select Import and then Import Application from Visual Builder Studio Git.
Select Add Credentials.
Enter the Git repository URL using the following format: https://host/organization.
Enter the user name and password of the Git user, and then click Save Credentials.
From the Project Selection drop down list, select your project.
From the Repository Selection drop down list, select your repository.
From the Branch Selection drop down list, select your branch.
Give the application a name, an ID and a brief description.
Click Save Configuration.

Once you're done, you then set up the user role mapping.

Finally, stage and publish the application. If you're using a Vanity URL, then make sure you've followed the steps from the Set Up Vanity URLs.