Moving Your Liquid Data Control Applications to Production

When you move any Liquid Data deployment from development to production, you must move Liquid Data and WebLogic Server resources (JDBC Connection Pools, Liquid Data Data Sources, the Liquid Data repository, and so on) from the development environment to the production environment. For details about deploying Liquid Data, see the Liquid Data Deployment Guide.

For applications that use Liquid Data controls, you must also deploy and update the ldcontrol.properties file, which contains connection information for Liquid Data controls. This section describes the development to production lifecycle and provides the basic steps for moving an application containing Liquid Data controls from development to production. The following sections are included:

Development to Production Lifecycle Architecture

In a typical development scenario, you will develop your applications in one environment and then deploy them in another. There are two main artifacts that you need to deploy on the production environment:

Figure 1-21 Development to Production Lifecycle

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Packaging Liquid Data JAR Files in Application .ear Files

After you have developed and tested your application using WebLogic Workshop in your development environment, you must create a .ear file for deployment to your production server(s). If you are deploying the application to a domain that does not include Liquid Data, you must add the ldcontrol.jar and LDC-client.jar files to your application library before creating the .ear file.

This section describes the following procedures:

To Add the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar Files to the Application Library

Perform the following steps to add the Liquid Data .jar files to your application:

  1. Open your application in WebLogic Workshop, if it is not already opened.
  2. Select the Libraries directory, right-click, and select Add Library (or select File —> Import Library from the Workshop menu).
  3. In the Add Library dialog, navigate to the BEA_HOME/weblogic81/liquiddata/server/lib directory and select the ldcontrol.jar and LDC-client.jar files.

Figure 1-22 Add ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar to Application Library

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  1. Click Open to add the ldcontrol.jar and LDC-client.jar files to your application library.

To Generate the .ear File in Workshop

Perform the following steps to generate an enterprise archive file (.ear) in WebLogic Workshop:

  1. Open your application in WebLogic Workshop, if it is not already opened.
  2. Add the Liquid Data client jar files to your application library as described in To Add the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar Files to the Application Library.
  3. Select Build —>Build EAR from the Workshop menu.

When the build is complete, WebLogic Workshop lists the .ear file location in the Build window.

Liquid Data ldcontrol.properties File

Each domain that runs Liquid Data Control applications has a single ldcontrol.properties file, which stores the connection information for all Liquid Data Control applications running in the domain. The ldcontrol.properties file is located at the root directory of your domain where the Liquid Data Control applation .ear file is deployed. There is an entry in the ldcontrol.properties file for each control you have created in each application.

The entries in the ldcontrol.properties file are of the following form:

AppName.ProjectName.FolderName.jcxName=t3\://hostname\:port 

where:

Name
Description
AppName 

The name of the WebLogic Workshop application.

ProjectName 

The name of the WebLogic Workshop Project which contains the Liquid Data Control.

FolderName 

The name of the folder which contains the Liquid Data Control.

jcxName 

The name of the Liquid Data Control file (without the .jcx extension). For example, if the control file is named myLDControl.jcx, the entry in this file is myLDControl.

hostname 

The hostname or IP address of the Liquid Data Server for this control.

port 

The port number for the Liquid Data Server for this control.

Note: The colons (:) in the URL must be escaped with a backslash (\) character.

If the URL value is missing, the Liquid Data Control uses the connection information from the domain config.xml file.

The following is a sample ldcontrol.properties file.

#Fri Jul 11 15:30:36 PDT 2003
myTest.myTestWeb.myFolder.Untitled=t3\:myLDServer\:7001
myTest.myTestWeb.myFolder.myControl=
SampleApp.LiquidDataSampleApp.Controls.RTLControl=t3\:myLDServer\:7001
SampleApp.Untitled.NewFolder.Untitled=t3\:yourLDServer\:7001
testnew.Untitled.NewFolder.ldc=
test.testWeb.NewFolder.Untitled= 

Remove ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar From Production CLASSPATH

When you use the Domain Configuration Wizard to create a Liquid Data domain, the domain includes the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar files in the server CLASSPATH. These are required for a development environment. For a production environment, however, these two .jar files should not be in the server CLASSPATH. Instead, package the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar files in the .ear file, as described in To Add the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar Files to the Application Library.

If the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar files are in the server CLASSPATH, you will need to restart the server in order for the read changes to the ldcontrol.properties file. If the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar files are not in the server CLASSPATH and you include the files in your application library, then changes to the ldcontrol.properties file are reloaded when you redeploy the application. You should therefore remove these files from the server CLASSPATH in the startup file for your production domain.

Steps For Deploying to Production

This section describes the following basic steps for moving an application from development to production:

Step 1: Add ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar files to Application Library

Add the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar files (from the BEA_HOME/weblogic81/liquiddata/server/lib directory) to the Libraries directory in your application. For details of how do this, see To Add the ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar Files to the Application Library.

Note: If you used the Configuration Wizard to create a Liquid Data-enabled domain, you do not have to do this, but you lose the flexibility of the ldcontol.properties file being automatically reloaded when you deploy/undeploy an application. In this case, you should remove these files from the server CLASSPATH (see Remove ldcontrol.jar and LDS-client.jar From Production CLASSPATH for more details).

Step 2: Generate Enterprise Application Archive (.ear) in Workshop

Use WebLogic Workshop to generate the .ear file for your application as described in To Generate the .ear File in Workshop.

Step 3: Merge ldcontrol.properties File entries to Production Server

Merge the ldcontrol.properties file from the root level of your development domain with the ldcontrol.properties file in the root level of the production domain. If the ldcontrol.properties file does not exist in the production domain, copy it from your development domain.

You must also update the URLs in each entry of the file to reference the production Liquid Data servers. For details on and for the syntax of the ldcontrol.properties file, see Liquid Data ldcontrol.properties File.

Step 4: Deploy Enterprise Application Archive (.ear) on Production Server

Deploy your enterprise archive (.ear) file on the production WebLogic Server. You deploy the .ear file from the domain —> Deployments —> Applications node of the WebLogic Server Administration Console. The .ear file must be accessible from the filesystem in which the WebLogic administration server is running. For details on deploying .ear files, see Deploying WebLogic Server Applications from the WebLogic Server documentation.