Contents
About this Release
These Release Notes give an overview and additional information on the latest Release Control plugin releases.
See the What's New tab for a complete list of the latest new features in each of the plugins.
For information on versions of the plugins released with Release Control 6.2, see the June 2017 Plugins Release Notes.
For information on versions of the plugins for use with versions of Release Control earlier than 6.2, see the August/November 2016 Plugins Readme.
Supported Configurations
Although plugin support is typically backward compatible, due to architecture changes, plugin versions released in June 2017 will work only with Release Control 6.2 or later and plugin versions released in December 2017 will work only with Release Control 6.2.1 or later.
Earlier versions of the plugins will not work with Release Control 6.2 or 6.2.1 without manual updates.
Detailed information about supported platforms and software configuration is available in the Supported Platform List.
Third-party Tools
For more information regarding third-party software copyrights and license information, see the Attribution Report.
What's New
For information on changes included in this release, see the following sections.
Enhancements
The following enhancements are included in the latest plugin releases:
- New
Silk Central
Plugin
- The new
Silk Central
plugin enables you to:
- Associate execution plans with deployment units
- Run execution plans in deployment tasks
- Create execution plans as you are associating them with deployment units or tasks
- The new
Silk Central
plugin enables you to:
- Enhanced Plugin Administration
Release Control Administration has several enhancements for more convenient plugin administration.
- Validate configurations immediately: Validate your configurations as you set them up to ensure the connection information is correct. This option is enabled as part of the plugin implementation.
- Choose when to make configurations available: Choose whether to make the configuration available to users by making it active or inactive.
- Decide when to upgrade or downgrade plugin instances: Upgrade alerts appear in the Release Control Administration UI when plugin upgrades are available and can upgrade plugin instances when you are ready. Different plugin instances can use different versions of plugins, and you can choose to downgrade instances of plugins to earlier supported plugin versions if needed.
- Create base configurations separately from their derivative configurations: You can now create base configurations without creating an item or action configuration at the same time.
- Enhanced
Deployment Automation
Plugin
The Deployment Automation plugin has the following enhancements:
- If you cancel a Deployment Automation task, the corresponding Deployment Automation process is cancelled in Deployment Automation.
- You can now set an environment filter in the configuration to limit the environment selection in tasks.
- Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality has been enhanced to enable the user name and password in the plugin configuration to be used for login to Deployment Automation instead of the currently logged in SBM user. If User Name and Password are specified in the configuration, they are now used for login, regardless of whether Use Single Sign-On (SSO) is selected.
- Enhanced
ChangeMan ZMF
Plugin
The ChangeMan ZMF plugin has the following enhancements:
- You can configure tasks using the backout action.
- You can enter filter values for promotion site and promotion environment.
- Enhanced
SBM
Plugin
The SBM plugin has the following enhancements:
- You can now create items through any supported item configuration while linking items to SBM tasks. This includes items such as Deployment Automation component versions and ChangeMan ZMF change packages as well as SBM items.
- The following field types are now available when you are
creating
SBM
items:
- Binary/Trinary
- Date/Time
- Multi-Group
- Multi-Relational
- Multi-Selection
- Multi-User
- Numeric
- Single Relational
- Single Selection
- Text
- User
- For manual task creation, you can specify defaults for all values in the plugin configuration except for title and description.
Upgrades
All supported versions of the plugins are installed with new installations of Release Control version 6.2.1.
- Existing versions are not automatically upgraded.
- You are alerted that upgrades are available, and you can manually upgrade a plugin instance when you are ready.
- Multiple versions of plugins can be added to your Release Control implementation, and you can create configurations based on each of those versions.
For documentation for the plugins, see the Documentation Center.
Before you upgrade your plugins, review the following sections, and then proceed with the upgrade.
- Manually Upgrading Plugins
- Post Upgrade Activities for Plugins
- Related Upgrades
- Troubleshooting Plugin Upgrades
- Upgrading from Custom or Earlier Versions of Plugins
Manually Upgrading Plugins
After you upgrade to Release Control version 6.2.1 from version 6.2, or after you manually install the latest plugins in Release Control version 6.2, the earlier versions of plugins are retained. You can manually upgrade plugin instances at your convenience.
When new plugin versions are available, an alert appears at the top right of the Release Control Administration UI.
Click the alert icon and then click Show to view the list of plugins that require upgrade.
Post Upgrade Activities for Plugins
You must do the following after upgrading to the latest versions of the plugins, especially if upgrading from a version earlier than version 6.2.
- If you have existing deployment tasks for the upgraded plugins, in each release package in the Deployment Tasks tab, edit and save the deployment tasks to populate them with the provider data that was stored differently in the earlier release.
- If you have plugin configurations that were created using the August 2016 version of the CA Nolio (now CA Release Automation) plugin, you must change the notification URL or use polling only. For details, see the plugin documentation on the Documentation Center.
- If you have existing requests or deployment units for the upgraded plugins, in each release package in the Requests or Deployment Units tab, click Reload Request Data or Reload Deployment Unit Data respectively to pick up any new data available due to plugin changes.
Troubleshooting Plugin Upgrades
After upgrading, you may encounter one of the following issues:
- Custom columns you added are no longer in the table
The columns in the Deployment Units and Requests tabs no longer show fields previously configured in the RLC Custom Columns auxiliary table Default DU Custom Columns and Default Request Custom Columns entities. This means those table entries may have reverted to the defaults. This happens if you upgrade without deselecting the Include entity data check box in the Entities step when promoting the Release Data process app.
If this occurs, you will need to reconfigure the default custom column entries as needed.
- New configuration fields don't appear in the existing
configurations
After upgrading, the new configuration fields for some plugins do not appear in existing plugin configurations in the Release Control Administration, so it isn't possible to configure them. If you do not do this after upgrading the Dimensions CM plugin, an example error message you may get is the following:
Could not resolve placeholder 'deploy_unit_custom_attributes' in string value "${deploy_unit_custom_attributes}"
If this occurs, you will need to open each existing configuration in the Release Control Administration, click Update Configuration, then re-open the configuration and configure the new fields as needed.
If you need to determine the exact version and build number of a plugin, view the manifest.mf file in the META-INF folder in the plugin JAR file archive.
Upgrading from Custom or Earlier Versions of Plugins
Any custom plugins are automatically backed up in the ..\Program Files\Micro Focus\Release Control\rlc_lib_backup directory when upgrading to Release Control 6.2.1 from version 6.1.0 or 6.1.1.
If you're upgrading from 6.0.1, you must manually back up your custom plugins before upgrading SBM.If you want to upgrade your custom plugins or want to upgrade earlier versions of the plugins, see Knowledgebase item S142171.
Known Issues
For issues related to the core solution, see the latest Release Control Release Notes on the Documentation Center.
These issues are applicable to upgrades from plugins version 3.0 to 3.1 and any issues for new plugins, such as Silk Central 1.0. For issues applicable to upgrades from plugin versions earlier than 3.0, also see the version 3.0 plugins Release Notes, which covers some issues related to architectural changes in plugins for that release.
For issues applicable to versions of the plugins earlier than those included with versions 6.2.x of Release Control, see the August/November 2016 Plugins Readme.
Plugin issues known to exist in the latest plugins at the time of release are as follows.
General Plugin Issues
-
In clustered
SBM
environments, for new installations, default plugin configurations are created
twice. (DEF301515)
If you install into a clustered SBM and apply changes on both nodes simultaneously, duplicate plugin configurations are created in Release Control Administration. To resolve this, you should manually delete one set of the configurations.
-
After upgrading from a version earlier than 3.0 of
SBM,
ServiceNow, JIRA, and
Dimensions CM
plugins, requests cannot be related to deployment tasks in release packages
that existed prior to the upgrade. (DEF299245)
To relate requests to deployment tasks after upgrading, you must create a new release package. This is relevant for the following plugins: SBM, ServiceNow, JIRA, and Dimensions CM. For information on this issue, see Troubleshooting Plugin Upgrades.
-
If your computer's locale is different from the
SBM
locale, the value for time fields is different on edit and view forms.
(DEF301270)
If your computer's locale and your SBM locale are different, when you create items in Release Control, values are shown in different locales on edit and view forms. Edit forms use SBM locale as they are communicating with the server, but view forms use the computer's locale. To ensure dates are consistent on edit and view forms, you must set the SBM user profile and the computer to the same locale.
-
When more than one person is editing the same configuration at the
same time, the configuration may have stale values. (DEF302669)
When sharing editing of configurations among multiple administrators, ensure you have the latest data by refreshing your view before starting to edit.
-
Configuration override rules are not applied for action configurations with a scope limited by a custom tag. (DEF308159)
If you try to use configuration overrides for action configurations with a tag other than EXECUTION, the override is ignored.
-
When limiting environments through environment-specific
configuration overrides, it's possible to fill in disallowed environments if
you copy tasks from other release items. (DEF308100)
When limiting environments through environment-specific configuration overrides, it's possible to fill in disallowed environments if you copy tasks from other release items such as deployable release trains, release packages, and task templates and copy values for all environments.
Atlassian JIRA Plugin
- No known issues
CA Nolio Plugin
- No known issues
ChangeMan ZMF Plugin
-
If $ is used in a name of a
ChangeMan ZMF
Environment in configuration overrides, it causes problems with the release
package UI and functionality. (DEF306098)
If you use $ in ZMF environment names and plan to use configuration overrides, see Knowledgebase item S142294 for a workaround for this issue.
- No known issues
Dimensions CM Plugins
-
Plugin version 3.0 tasks with the Deploy action fail with
JAXBException in the rlc.log. (DEF308388)
If you are using the Dimensions CM plugin version 3.0 with Release Control 6.2.1, deployment and failure tasks with the Deploy action can't be completed. JAXBException will appear in the rlc.log file. This issue appears if you are using the version 3.0 plugin only, or if you are using version 3.0 and 3.1 plugin instances. See Knowledgebase item S142323 for the fix for this issue.
-
For plugin version 3.1, status updates from
Dimensions CM
are limited to those for promotions if you use the documented ALF endpoint URL.
(DOC315789)
The Dimensions CM plugin version 3.1 has been updated to use a new URL for DM_ALF_ENDPOINT. To receive full status updates from Dimensions CM, you must use the following endpoint:
DM_ALF_ENDPOINT http://serverName:8085/rlc/notification/dimensionscm
Note: For the ALF endpoint server name and port, use the server where SBM Common Services are installed. The port number is 8085 by default.The endpoint URL is incorrect for version 3.1 in the Release Control Dimensions CM Plugin Quick Reference and Release Control Plugin Index in "Configuring Dimensions CM ALF Settings", "Identifying Required ALF Locations" step 2.
Jenkins Plugin
-
If Prevent Cross Site Request Forgery Exploits is set in
Jenkins, jobs run in
Release Control
tasks are not started.
If Prevent Cross Site Request Forgery Exploits is set in Jenkins security, Release Control tasks that run Jenkins jobs can't complete and have a status of "Failed to start the Jenkins build job or retrieve the job build number." This setting causes Jenkins to protect the starting job.
SBM Plugin
-
Fixed precision numbers with fractions are rounded off.
(DEF306532)
If you use fixed precision numbers in your process app, when SBM items are created through Release Control, the numbers are rounded off rather than displayed with the correct precision.
-
When using object creation to submit an
SBM
form, Javascript code,
SBM
form actions, REST Grids, and Relational Grids defined on
SBM
forms are ignored.
SBM object creation will ignore any form actions, grids, and JavaScript code for any process app that contains these elements. For example, when an SBM object creation is used to submit an SSM Configuration Management item, both service-specific and hardware-specific fields are displayed, even if Is Service is selected.
-
To create
SBM
items using
Release Control
when using remote
SBM
instances, you must use basic authentication.
You must use basic authentication when using remote SBM instances. SSO is not supported.
- No known issues
-
The custom columns for the
Silk Central
plugin do not include some of the commonly used ones, such as created on,
created by, changed on, and changed by. (ENH306614)
There is currently a limitation where a few columns that would be desirable as custom columns are not available. These include created on, created by, changed on, and changed by.
-
When a deployment or failure task is associated with an execution
plan that has manual test cases associated with it, the task may be completed
with a different status than the corresponding execution plan in
Silk Central.
(DEF307616)
Release Control receives the status of test cases inside the plan rather than the status of the entire execution plan. The task in Release Control is completed as soon as all tests in the associated execution plan have been passed, or at least one of test cases has been failed. It doesn't wait until the entire execution plan is finished. Statuses of test case executions may be changed after the task is completed in Release Control.