Ease up your SoaSuite deployment using global Tokens in composites

Yesterday a project-colleague pointed me to a cool new feature in SOASuite Patch set 6 (11.1.1.7).

Everyone who has done deployments of SOASuite throughout different stages within a Dev., Test, Acc. & Prod. lifecycle knows the throubles that end-pointreferences causes. One improvement in SOASuite 11g was the introduction of configuration plans. However those are not only environment specific, but also composite related. So for every composite you need one for every stage in the lifecycle.

In my release/deployment framework I solved this to have just a default generated configuration plan per composite, with development values. That one I 'subversioned' along with the composite.

Then in the (ant based) release proces I adapted the configuration plan for each composite, replacing each server reference with an ant-property. Then during the deploy I have conf plan copied to one that is specific for the target environment, replacing the properties based on a environment properties file.

Now in Patch Set 6, Oracle took that a level further. Now you can place those properties yourself in the composite on the references. There you replace the specific endpoints with those properties. In the EnterpriseManager you can bulk import the property values for the specific development-cycle stage using a "mdm-url-resolver.xml" xml file. But you can also enter or edit specific values one by one in the Enterprise Manager. For Ant users, the tokens have the same markup as Ant-properties.

This removes the need of configuration plans. Also it might be easier to clone for example a production environment to do for example a deployment test of  a new release.

Read all about it in the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite.

BTW.: this feature is mentioned to me by Tony van Esch, who wrote a little more elaborate blog on this himself.