Data Synchronization

Context

The following section covers the sixth step in your process deployment, as described in From Studio to the cloud.

When you have already exported and imported a .bex into your target environment, you have effectively transported your processes and everything needed for your application to be runnable in that environment. This step is all about doing a similar process to the data you had in the authoring environment, given that you need it in your target environment.

Overview

Up until this point, the Deployment procedure has only considered metadata. This means that your target environment now hosts "the shell" of your project, that is, all the imported processes and parameter entities. If you have data in your development environment that you wish to preserve in your target environment, then you need to perform a Data Synchronization.

How to perform a Data Synchronization procedure?

The Data Synchronization consists of two utilities that are launched from the Management Console or Deployment by commands: Export data and Import data. The first step is to generate a .bdex file, which is the result of the Export data procedure performed on the Source environment. After that, the next step is to import such a .bdex file into the target environment by launching the Import data procedure from the Target environment.

This procedure lets you take data from your development environment to another environment. The data that you can select to be included in the procedure is listed below:

•Parameter Values managed in production.

•Users and their relations.

oAreas

oGroups

oLanguages

oLocations

oOrganizations

oPositions

oRoles

oSkills

oTime Zone

oWorking Time Schema

Keep in mind that you can only import data into an environment whose corresponding metadata has already been deployed. This means that, if you have not deployed an entity into an environment, you cannot synchronize its data in that same environment.