In order to test application projects or to deploy applications to users, the application project must be published from the Agentry Editor to the Agentry Server. If you are ready to distribute the application to the end users, it must then be deployed to the SAP Mobile Platform Server, after it has been published. At this point it will then be made available to and downloaded by those Agentry Clients that synchronize.
There are two types of publishes that can be performed, Development and Production. When publishing an application from the Agentry Editor, there are various aspects that will affect the type of publish performed and which options to select during the process. Additionally, the first time an application project is published there is some initial configuration performed by the publish process that will affect the Agentry Server.
Other options exist for the publish process, including the creation of files used for localization of the application. When performing a production publish, the publish version of the application must be set. Also during a production publish the option exists to delay the deployment from the Agentry Server to Agentry Clients until a specified date and time.
For all publish operations the application data is copied to the Agentry Server, with transformation of the application data into the format for the Agentry Server. This format will vary depending on whether the target Agentry Server is configured for development or production. The location of the application data will be in the Agentry Server’s configuration directory, in either the subdirectory Application\Development for a development publish, or Application\Production\Version for a production publish. To perform a publish it is necessary to have read-write access to this location.
When developing a new application or when customizing an existing one, it will be necessary to perform several publishes to an instance of the Agentry Server provided within the SAP Mobile Platform Server. This Agentry Server instance should be installed as a development server; that is, the Configuration property Development Server should be set to true. Note that it is false by default and must be modified after the SAP Mobile Platform Server has been installed.
When development and testing are complete, the application can be published to the SAP Mobile Platform Server. This is accomplished by performing a production publish to the Agentry Server configuration directory within the SAP Mobile Platform Server installed for end users. A production publish includes specification of a publish version number, which dictates certain application update behaviors performed by during the next transmit, and as described in the information provided specific to production publishing.
The files generated during a publish are compressed by default. This behavior can be altered using the preference settings in Eclipse for Agentry. There is no difference in the process of publishing the application based on whether or not the files are compressed. The Agentry Server automatically determines whether or not the files are compressed and will process them accordingly.