“Writing the first 90 percent of a computer program takes 90 percent of the time. The remaining ten percent also takes 90 percent of the time and the final touches also take 90 percent of the time.”
— Neil J. Rubenking
Well, the test results are starting to pour in, and it looks like I screwed things up when I manually edited the Update Set in an effort to eliminate one of the errors reported in the earlier testing cycle. It seems as if I should have left well enough alone and just informed people to ignore the error if it comes up. Here is an unmolested Update Set that should not have the problem that I created by hacking up the earlier version after it was generated. Hopefully, this will resolve that issue.
Two things to note, then, of this new version: 1) if you happen to get the unfortunate Table ‘sys_hub_action_status_metadata’ does not exist error, just ignore it, and 2) if you get any preview errors related to any sys_properties, be sure to skip those updates, as you do not want to overlay the property values that were established during the set-up process.
One of the other things that was reported was that it was not really clear as to what, exactly, needed to be tested. I have a tendency to focus on the construction process exclusively, without a lot of attention to the actual end product itself, so let’s see if we can’t rectify that situation a little bit now.
The initial early release of this effort was focused on the set-up process. All the set-up process does is set you up as the Host instance, or get you registered with a Host instance if you are setting up a Client instance. That’s all that it did, so the testing was limited to attempting to set up a Host, and then attempting to set up one or more Clients. A successful test would have all instances appear in the instance table on every instance involved in the testing. That seemed to be pretty straightforward.
For this next iteration, we introduced the ability to actually publish a Scoped Application to the Host. To test this newest feature, you will first have to have gone through the set-up process successfully, and then you need an app to publish. Any app in development will do, and if you don’t have one, you can always just stub one out for the testing.
To publish an app, you need to bring up the app’s primary form, and if all went well with the installation, there should be a new UI Action down at the bottom of the page called Publish to Collaboration Store.
If you click on that guy and follow the ensuing pop-up dialogs through completion, the app should be published. To verify that all went well, you will have to go over to the Host instance and see if the app actually appears in the Related List under the publisher’s instance record. You should verify the presence of the application record, the version record, and the XML Update Set attachment. If all of those things are present, then the app was successfully published to the Host.
The one thing that will not happen just yet is for the newly published app to be distributed to any of the other Client instances in the community. That process is still under development, and is not included in this version of the application. Once that gets completed and all of the issues from this round of testing get resolved, we will put out yet another beta test version and go through the testing process all over again.
Thanks again to all of you who are taking the time to take this out for a spin. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated. Please feel free to report any issues or successes in the comments below. Next time, if there are no further results to review, we will take a look at building out the distribution of newly published versions to the rest of the instances served by the Host.
