Importing Environment-Specific Data

Configuration entities that include references to environment-specific values should be imported with extreme care. Unintentionally overriding these values with data sourced from another environment may disrupt the proper function of the application. Note that these records may be initially imported from another environment but are typically adjusted manually to reflect current environment settings and should not be updated again by an import.

The sole purpose of some maintenance objects, like Message Sender, is to define environment-specific settings. As such, they are easily identifiable and included in a designated integration related migration request (F1-IntegrationConfig) that can be used carefully and as needed.

However, general purpose maintenance objects, like Extendable Lookup and Master Configuration, are designed to define various types of configurations where some may contain environment-specific information. For example, while most extendable lookup records do not contain environment-specific settings, the File Storage Configuration (F1-FileStorage) extendable lookup includes object storage definitions that are environment dependent.

The following mechanism may be used to prevent an unintentional update of such records by a CMA import. It identifies the records containing environment-specific data and allows for them to be added but not updated as follows:

• Use the Environment Specific option to mark business objects that define environment specific information. For example, the business object for the File Storage Configuration extendable lookup is marked with this option.
  Note: This option is available for Extendable Lookup and Master Configuration business objects but may be configured to be valid for other maintenance objects as needed.
• The product supports a generic migration plan pre-compare algorithm that prevents an update of an entity that its business object is marked as containing environment-specific data using the designated option.
  Note: The algorithm is added to the Extendable Lookup and Master Configuration default migration plans and can be added to other migration plans as needed.

In addition, the following changes were made to keep such entities in environment-specific related migration requests:

• The wholesale General System Options migration request excludes extendable lookup and master configuration records that their business object indicates they contain environment-specific information.
• The wholesale Framework Integration Configuration migration request include only those extendable lookup and master configuration records that their business object indicates they contain environment-specific information.