We talked about making structural changes in the Dev environment - but what’s considered a structural change?
What are structural changes?
There are numerous changes that are seen as structural. This means that they’re mostly not allowed in the Prod environment, but they are allowed to be implemented in the Dev environment before being pushed to Prod.
The standard Enterprise plan on Pigment includes the Dev and Prod environments by default. For more information on adding a third environment, or increasing your data volume in T&D, contact your Pigment CSM.
Each type of change and associated behavior in Dev and Prod environments is documented here in the article: Understand Test & Deploy for Pigment Features
As a general guideline, a structural change in a model is anything that impacts your model structure. For example, Application settings, Block structures or formulas: these are changes that are managed by T&D.
All changes handled by App Lock are considered structural:
Specifically, all structural changes are considered changes protected by the following permissions:
- Display Application
- Configure Application
- Configure Calendar
- Create & delete folders
- Configure Blocks
Additionally, changes in Connected Dimension Lists are also managed by T&D and correspond to changes protected by the following permissions:
- Add List Items (except for Dimension Lists with disconnected Items)
- Remove List Items (except for Dimension Lists with disconnected Items)
- Reorder List Items (except for Dimension Lists with disconnected Items)
For more information, see Data changes in Dimension Lists.
Finally, T&D also manages, to a certain extent, View features changes protected by the following permissions:
- Configure Views
- Configure Boards
For more information, see Understand Test & Deploy for Pigment Features.
Data changes in Dimension Lists
Another structural change to consider in T&D is data in Dimension Lists. By default, Items in Dimension Lists are considered structural and kept in sync across environments. Changes made to those Items, such as adding, editing, or removing Items are managed in the Dev environment then deployed to the Production environment.
You can configure this behavior through the Item management setting of the Dimension List, which allows Members to alternate between 2 options:
- Keep Items in Sync (default)
- Disconnect Items
The Item management setting also determines how you manage imports.
If the Items management setting is set to Disconnect Items for a Dimension List, then its Items are maintained in the Prod environment. This means that changes to Items on these Dimension Lists in the Dev environment are neither tracked, nor deployed to the Prod environment because they’re not considered structural changes. Therefore, adding, editing, and removing Items from these Dimension Lists are permitted in the Prod environment.
Dimension Lists with disconnected Items can be useful when:
- You need to add, edit or delete Items frequently in the Prod environment, and it’s not practical to manage it with deployments.
- You want to give your business users, who have no access to the Dev environment, the ability to add, edit, and delete Items in that Dimension List.
Before disconnecting Items and making them deletable in Prod, note that any Item deletion in Prod can cause a loss of data.
Typical examples of Dimension Lists with disconnected Items could be:
- SKU Dimension
- Employee Dimension
To find out how Items are managed in a specific Dimension List, open the settings for your Dimension List, and go to Item Management in the General tab.
Some features are not supported with Dimension Lists with disconnected items. For more information, see Understand Test & Deploy for Pigment Features.
In summary, T&D focuses on structural data changes. If you perform any manual inputs, or if you import data to Dimensions with disconnected Items, you do these actions directly in the Prod environment.