A production publish is performed to an instance of the Agentry Production Server typically when it is time to deploy the application to users. The production publish is the first part of the deployment process, with the next steps being the packaging of the application resources published to the Agentry Production Server, followed by the deployment of that package using the SAP Control Center for the SAP Mobile Platform runtime environment.
A production publish will transfer the application project from the Agentry Editor to the Agentry Production Server. The location of the project on the file system is within the Agentry Server’s installation location in the sub-directory Application\Production. The entire project is written to a single file at this location with an extension of .agpz. This file encapsulates the application for the version published, which is specified in the publish wizard. A configuration file with the file extension .ini is also created and should be considered a part of the application for the purposes of copying or transport.
During the production publish the version number and deployment date and time can be specified. The specified version number can affect the behavior of the application during client-server synchronization of the new version, with a change to the major version number having one effect and a change to the minor or modification number another.
As a part of the process of performing a production publish, the version number for the application must be specified. The first time a production publish is performed to the Agentry Production Server, the version umber will be 1.0. During subsequent production publishes to the same Server instance, the version number is changed based on the selection made in the Publish Wizard.
An Agentry project’s publish version contains three components, a major, minor, and modification number. In the publish version 3.2 mod 1, the 3 is the major version, 2 is the minor version, and 1 is the modification number. The Publish Wizard will contain a section where the developer will specify which of these should be changed. This selection impacts the behavior of the application during the next synchronization by the Agentry Clients.
The specific difference is related to the processing of transactions sent from the Client to the Server. Depending on the nature of the change made to the application, it is possible that changes captured on the Client in transactions using the previous application version will be incompatible with the new version of those same transactions. When the synchronization definitions of the transaction (server data state or update steps) perform processing that will not work with the previous version of the application, it is necessary to process those transactions with the previous application version. To force this behavior change the production publish version by incrementing the major version number.
When a new major version is specified, the Agentry Production Server will process each transaction sent by a Client using the old version of the application. Once all transactions have been processed, the new version of the application will be sent to the Client and dictate any subsequent synchronization behaviors. When either the minor or modification numbers are changed, the new version of the application takes effect immediately, before the pending transactions on the client are processed.
Because of this behavior, it is the responsibility of the developer performing the publish to determine which behavior is desired, and to then select the proper change to the publish version of the application.