When T&D (Test & Deploy) is set up on your Workspace, you’ll start making changes and you’ll want to push those changes to your Production environment. This is what we call a deployment.

What is a deployment?

A deployment is the action of making your Prod environment structurally identical to your Dev environment, by pushing changes made in Prod to Dev.

Deployment in T&D occurs in 2 steps:

1. Both the Dev and Prod environments are compared, and a list of all structural changes, or the changes supported by T&D, are displayed.
2. After you review the structural changes, you push those changes from Dev to Prod.

The deployment captures all changes made in any Application within the Dev environment.

Who can perform a deployment?

Only Members with the Can Use Test & Deploy Workspace permission in all Workspaces (Dev, Test, Prod) can perform a deployment. This permission is assigned to the Builder Role or higher.

In addition, whoever performs deployments in T&D needs necessary permissions for the specific structural changes applied in both Workspaces. For example, if a Member deploys changes made to Application A in the Dev Workspace, the Member also needs the correct permissions and access to Application A in both the Dev and Prod workspaces. We discuss this in Permission Issues. 

How to perform a deployment?

1. From the Dev Workspace homepage, click New Deployment.

   Pigment performs all permission checks. If you’re missing Application permissions, a message is displayed.
    

   

   
   When all permission checks are performed and cleared, and no disallowed Dimensional references are made, Pigment displays a list of all changes in the Dev Workspace since the last deployment. For more information, see References to Disconnected Items. 

   Navigate the list, or Diff screen to review details of the latest structural changes. 
    

   

   
    
2. Next, click Deploy X Applications, enter a small description for the deployment, then click Deploy.

   Pigment runs a final check of Workspace differences and permissions before starting deployment.

   All Applications managed by T&D are unavailable in both Workspaces during deployment to prevent further changes.

   When the deployment is finished, Members on both Workspaces are notified:

   - All Members with the Builder role in the Dev Workspace.
   - The Members who performed the deployment in the Prod Workspace.

   

3. When deployment is finished, go to Deployments in the target Workspace homepage.
   This page shows all deployments, including the Members responsible, deployment dates and times, as well as the number of Applications and changes involved.

What can prevent a Member performing a deployment?

There are two main issues why you may not be able to perform a deploy on some updates applied to Applications in the source or Dev environment.

Permission Issues

The Member doesn’t have the proper permissions to review and push the changes that have been applied to an Application:

• The Member doesn’t have a Builder or above role in the target environment.
• To make changes in both the source and target environments, a Member needs the appropriate permissions in each Application.

Before performing the deployment, the Member must ensure they have the necessary access to the Applications in both environments. If they don’t have the required permissions, they should ask someone with the appropriate permissions to carry out the deployment.

References to Disconnected Items 

One or more disconnected Dimensions are being referenced by other Blocks in a way that Pigment doesn’t allow in the context of T&D. The disallowed references for these Dimensions are:

• Formulas that are referencing Items from these Dimensions.
• Dimensions with Items kept in sync that have Properties of type Dimension referencing disconnected Items.

In this case, the Member needs to either remove those references, or needs to convert the Dimension so that its Items are connected.

Deploy a Subset of Changes

It is possible to deploy changes that exclude Views by unselecting all View changes relative to Blocks that had a change. For more information, see View Level Features. 

Rollback a Set of Changes

Any change pushed to the Prod environment that doesn’t destroy data can be replicated in the Dev environment and pushed to the Prod environment again.

However, for any changes that are destructive of data, and that have been deployed by mistake to the Prod environment, we recommend that you reach out to the Support team to restore a previous version of your environment.

Related Information

• Introduction to Test & Deploy
• Map Out Your Test & Deploy Environments
• Understand Structural Changes in Test & Deploy
• Understand Test & Deploy for Pigment Features