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Tailoring Lifecycle

Make sure you are familiar with the IFS Cloud platform fundamentals and high level architecture before reading this page.

As explained in the tailoring overview, IFS Cloud offers three ways that tailoring's can be done. The recommendation for how to handle them through the customer solution lifecycle are:

  • Configurations are handled according to the inner and outer configuration lifecycle flow as described below.
  • Extend on the inside (customizations) are handled according to the normal customer solution development and propagated between environments as part of deliveries.
  • Extend on the outside tailorings fall outside the scope of what is and should be managed in IFS Lifecycle Experience. These tailorings should never be stored in the customer solution repository, nor should they be deployed into build place or use place environments (they can of course be deployed elsewhere and integrated with IFS Cloud environments in build place and use place).

By following this guidance a number of important goals are met:

  • Both customizations and configurations are stored inside the customer solutions repository so that there is one single source of truth about what the customer solution actually looks like.
  • Changes to configurations and/or customizations that depend on each other can be done together on a topic branch and promoted together to the master branch as well as through deliveries to use place environments.
  • Configurations become version controlled just like everything else. There is no need to set up and manage any separate storage for configurations (e.g. SharePoint sites).
  • The configuration lifecycle flow slots nicely into the overall application lifecycle flow that is used to develop tailorings, applying updates, creating and applying deliveries.

Configuration lifecycle flow

Configurations have an inner and an outer lifecycle:

  • The inner lifecycle is how a configuration is managed within a single environment. How it is created (often in a draft state) and then made active (published) for all users or a group of users depending on the configuration context.
  • The outer lifecycle is about how a configuration moves between environments, on its own or together with other tailorings.

The key guidance for the outer lifecycle is that configurations are created either in build place DEV or use place CFG environments, exported and stored in the customer solution repository, included in deliveries to UAT and PROD use place environments where they are automatically installed or manually imported. A more detailed description is available in the configuration management chapter of the lifecycle guide.

Grouping configuration items into ACPs

Most IFS Cloud configurations can be included into Application Configuration Packages (ACPs) in order to be managed as a group, for example when moving the configurations between environments.