DevOps for Windchill

[Ben_A]

I'm trying to create a DevOps style of Windchill development and need some community guidance.

In a nut shell, we have 9 Windchill developers and we are all doing both configuration (inside Windchill) and customization (directly on the servers). We are having to duplicate the work between development, test, and production servers which is a colossal waste of time. Also, we currently have very little controls in place and our customer wants us to do better... they suggested we use DevOps.

I believe I can use a git repo to capture and apply server side changes but how do I capture configuration changes saved inside the Oracle DB and apply them to other servers that have their own, separate Oracle instances?

[avillanueva]

Talk to @jfelkins 

[tarik.wifak.p]

You can use any VCS tool like git to track the custom code, but pay attention where to put it, fearing to track all the directory structure !

Windchill has the concept of Safe Area to manage customization and Java files during updates and CPS maintenance, there are other processes for other type of files such as jars and properties. It’s well explained in a dedicated section in the basic customization help center.

Some customers creates their own custom ant scripts to automate their processes.

I didn’t understand the part of the db, if you are playing with Windchill schema, you must use Windchill Information Modeler to create artifacts and generate db scripts, the WIM must only be installed on the dev system, and normally you deploy what you did from dev to test then to production.

[Ben_A]

Hello @tarik.wifak.p ,

Thanks for your response. Sorry for the delayed reply. Been a busy few months trying to get this DevOps environment setup. We are using wtSafeArea and a Git repository to capture customizations made on Development machines and apply them to Test and Production servers. That's working great.

However, we continue to have trouble with the Windchill Configuration. Here is an example of our use case; If we develop a Workflow in Dev, that design (and all its many parts) is saved in the Oracle Database. We want to capture those changes and apply them to Test and Production databases. I have begun investigating tools like Oracle's GoldenGate and Red-Gate's Flyway for this capability. Do you know of other tools (PTC, or 3rd Party) we could use for this type of capture and deploy?

Thanks

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @Ben_A 

Workflow is the easy one. Just export/import 

You can use load from file to load workflows and it can be automated. 

Many years ago I created a package to deliver standard Windchill configuration with all config options what we used that time. WF,LC,Groups,Standard wtparts, doc templates, product templates, ACLs, site/org preferences and much more..

But during the time I realized that standardization is fine but each customer wants different things and the maintenance of the package for each customer was really time consuming to keep it up-to-date.

So now days I use just the stagingArea and manual export import from gui. I could automate it by own code, but our customers do not want it. 

PetrH

[vnamboodheri]

Hello @Ben_A, 

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