About Configuration Entities

Promotion transfers the process app design, originally created in SBM Composer, and optionally configuration data or entities to an environment. Configuration data includes notifications, reports, selections for User-type fields, and more.

The following tables show the entities that you can promote with process apps. The scope indicates where the data is contained. The entities that are marked Global are database-specific and apply to all process apps. Application-specific entities are tied to the workflows or projects in an application.

Process App Entities

You can choose to promote the following entities when you promote a process app or snapshot.

Entity	Scope	Promotion Options
Auxiliary tables and data	Global and application-specific	All, Selected, or None
E-mail Templates	Global	None or All
Mailboxes for E-mail Submission	Application-specific	None or All
Notifications	Global and application-specific	All, Selected, or None
Notification Rules	Global and application-specific	All, Referenced, or None
Projects	Application-specific	All, Selected, or None
Reports	Global and application-specific	All, Selected, or None
Transition Group Restrictions	Application-specific	None or All
User Field Selections	Global and application-specific	None or All

Global Entities

The following entities are included when you promote the Global Process App or any process app that contains a reference to the global application.

Entity	Scope	Promotion Options
Groups	Global	All, Selected, or None
Notifications associated with global auxiliary tables	Global	All, Selected, or None
Notification Rules	Global	All, Referenced, or None
Reports associated with global auxiliary tables	Global	All, Selected, or None
Folders	Global	All, Selected, or None
Users	Global	All, Selected, or None
Auxiliary Tables and data	Global	All, Selected, or None
Teams	Global	All, Selected, or None
Resources	Global	All, Selected, or None
User field selections for global auxiliary tables	Global	All or None

Tip: For customers who used the merge feature in an earlier version of SBM before references were available: When you promote a process app that includes the Global Application, you see Global Entities listed with the other applications in the process app. Otherwise, you must independently promote the Global Process App in order to promote those entities, which include users, groups, and calendars. (For information on moving to the use of references, see the SBM Composer documentation.)

Common Entities

The following entities are automatically included with every promotion.

Entity	Scope	Promotion Options
Application Groups (for solutions provided by Serena)	Application-specific	Automatically promoted
Public Feeds (Used in Work Center)	Application specific	Automatically promoted
Scripts	Global and application-specific	Automatically promoted
Triggers	Global	Automatically promoted
Web services	Global	Automatically promoted
Default Strings and translations for predefined locales	Application-specific	Automatically promoted
Report filters	Application-specific	Automatically promoted

For assistance with promoting custom application groups (those that are not packaged with a Serena solution such as Service Manager or Release Control), contact Serena Support.

Note: When a process app is promoted from one environment to another, default strings and translations that exist for predefined locales are overwritten in the target environment.

Important Considerations

Projects are never deleted during promotion. If projects are deleted in a test environment, for example, they are not deleted when the process app is promoted to a production environment. You can manually delete projects later, however.
Scripts, triggers, and Web services are automatically promoted when you promote a process app snapshot. You do not get the option to choose none, all, or selected.
The internal names for states, transitions, and workflows in the promotion payload are always considered primary and will override the internal names of state, transition, or workflow objects in the destination environment if the internal names differ between environments. If a state, transition, or workflow in the promotion payload does not contain an internal name yet, but the analogous object in the target environment already has an internal name, that name is preserved.
Translations for fixed length text field values in auxiliary tables are promoted, but primary table field values are not.
During promotion, if the internal project name clashes with an existing internal project name, the internal name in the target database is affected in one of two ways:
- For new projects that are added during promotion, when a conflict occurs, the project name in the target database will be a blank or empty string.
- For existing projects that are updated during promotion, when a conflict occurs, the project name in the target database remains unchanged. If the internal name in the incoming XML does not conflict with the internal name in the target database, then the promoted project's internal name is used.
Values for new promotion profiles are set to All by default, except for notification rules, which is set to Referenced by default. However, entities for new items (items added to a process app since the profile was created) will be set to None by default.
The Aux Tables entity selection has no effect if the Exclude auxiliary table data check box is selected on the New Process App Snapshot dialog box.

Promoting Reports

Reports (other than application reports, which are created in SBM Composer) are created, edited, and deleted by users. If you promote the reports in a process app, the reports in the destination environment are overwritten. This means that if a user customized a report in the production environment and an administrator promotes the standard report from a staging environment, the customization will be lost.
Reports that are defined in SBM Composer and appear to users as application reports are promoted automatically along with the process app and cannot be individually chosen for or excluded from promotion.
Listing reports that include join conditions are not included in promotions.

Promoting Users, Groups, and Roles

Transition Group Restrictions refers to the feature in SBM Application Administrator that enables administrators to restrict access to specified transitions based on groups.
Group membership is promoted only with users. If you promote only groups, user membership in the target environment does not change for those groups.
Role assignments are promoted only with projects. If you promote users and groups without projects, the role assignments associated with those users and groups do not change in the target environment, even if they changed in the environment from which you are promoting.

Considerations for Fields

When the User Field Selections check box is selected during promotion, settings made on user, multi-user, and multi-group fields at the workflow level are promoted from the snapshot to the target environment.
Enumeration mappings for User, Folder, and Project fields set for Web service actions in states and transitions in projects are not promoted from one environment to another. You must manually reconfigure these mappings after promotion.

Promoting E-Mail Templates

E-mail templates for the following types of notifications can be promoted:

Standard notifications: If None is selected for the E-mail Templates entity, no notification templates are promoted.
Templates for messages sent from items, scheduled report notifications, and e-mail submission replies: These templates are promoted even if None is selected, because their scope is global and they do not have application-specific references.

CAUTION:

All e-mail templates that are stored in the database are promoted.
If an environment has more than one template with the same name, the notification server will use the first template with that name when a notification is triggered. To prevent the wrong one from being used, make sure that each template you promote has a unique name (for example, give each template an application-specific name).

Promoting Application Groups

Application groups are a bundle of applications that come with a Serena-provided solution, such as Release Control, or that are created by an administrator for use with Serena Work Center.

Application groups are included in each snapshot for referenced applications. For example, if an application group contains Application A, Application B, and Application C, snapshots created each of these applications contain the references for all three applications.

When you promote a snapshot that contains an application group, each application referenced in the group should exist in the environment you are promoting to. Applications that are not in the environment are not listed as part of the application group in Application Administrator or Work Center. If you promote the missing applications, the references in the application group are resolved.

Promoting Work Center Views and Feeds

Shared views (activity, backlog, calendar, kanban, and dashboard) and public feeds added to those shared views are promoted with the applications they reference. The shared view owner must exist in both environments.

For example, Public Feed A is added to Shared View 1. The feed and view were created in Application X. When Application X is promoted, Public Feed A and Shared View 1 are promoted.

While these shared assets for groups and users will be promoted, they will not be pinned to the navigation menu in the target environment. Administrators or end-users will need to re-pin these in the target Work Center runtime environment.

Public feeds associated with system views are also promoted with the applications they reference. External feeds used in Kanban boards are promoted as well.

The following view and feed entities are not promoted:

Private views and feeds.
Shared views for the global context.