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, T&D manages all changes protected by the following permissions:
- Display Application
- Configure Application
- Configure Calendar
- Create & delete folders
- Configure Blocks
- Configure Views
- 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)
Data Changes in Dimension Lists
Another structural change to consider in T&D is data in Dimension Lists with Items kept in sync across environments, or more specifically, data in Dimension Lists where the Item management setting is set to Keep Items in Sync. This is the default Item management setting on Dimension Lists.
Metric and Transaction List data isn’t pushed to Prod, however this is how T&D handles data in Dimension Lists with Items kept in sync:
- With Items kept in sync, data changes in the Prod environment are not allowed. However data changes are logged and tracked in the Dev environment, which is later deployed to the Prod environment.
- With disconnected Items, data changes are allowed in Prod, and any data changes made in the Dev environment are considered, but aren’t deployed to the Prod environment.
The Item management setting also determines how you manage imports.
Let’s say you’re you’re working in the Prod environment, and you configure imports with a requirement to create new Items on Dimensions with Items in sync in the Prod environment, the import will fail. This is likely to happen when importing a Transaction List that includes a Dimension Property referencing a Dimension with Items kept in sync.
Dimension Lists with disconnected Items can be useful when:
- You need to add, edit or delete Items frequently in Prod, and it is not practical to manage it with deployments.
- You want to give your end users, who have no access to the Dev environment, the ability to add, edit, and delete Items in that Dimension.
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
Some features are not supported with Dimension Lists with disconnected items. You can find a list here in the article: 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.