Transport of Copies (Production TOCs)

As well as the functionality to push TOCs from Dev to QA, ActiveControl also includes the ability to create Transport Of Copies (TOC) for deployment to Production. This can be used to reduce the number of transports being deployed to Production, and by extension, reduce the time it takes to deploy them.

Production TOCs are created in the ActiveControl Windows GUI. This is done by right-mouse clicking on the required transport(s) and selecting “New Transport of Copies” > “For Production”.

The new Production TOC behaves quite differently from the ActiveControl ‘Testing TOC’ capability. Key points of note:

(1) the TOC will be put in the same location as the original transports.
(2) the original transports are deleted from the location.
(3) there is no user exit, a Transport Form is created automatically, which (i) ignores the task selections made in the GUI (ii) assigns the tasks of the original transports (4) takes the ActiveControl [Group] and [Type] coming from /BTI/TE_TOCONFIG DEPLOYTYPEID and DEPLOYGROUPID.
(5) If there is a user exit, then creating and moving the TF will be handled by the exit.
(6) When a TOC Transport Form is deleted completely without being completed, the original transports are added back to the original location.

This functionality is intended only for Production deployments, and will only work if all the transports imported in QA but not in Production are merged into a single TOC. Side effects could happen if the TOC is created earlier in the path or some transports are excluded from the TOC (and also many of the ShiftLeft analysers will not work correctly)

Configuration Steps

To configure Production TOCs, two configurations are required:

1) a couple entries must be added in table /BTI/TE_TOCONFIG in the Domain Controller.

DEPLOYTYPEID: The “Type” to be used for the TOC Transport Form (from /BTI/TE_TYPE)
DEPLOYGROUPID: The “Group” to be allocated to to the TOC Transport Form (from /BTI/TE_GROUPS

2) the system in which the TOC will be created should be configured as a valid source system in the path (in the ActiveControl Windows GUI)

3) User creating the Production TOC in the Windows GUI needs to have CREATETOCDEPLOY authorisation activity.