Deploying Multiple Deliveries as one delivery

When several single deliveries are to be installed, the normal way is to install them one by one in the same order as the deliveries was built.
If many single deliveries should be installed at the same time the script create-multi-delivery supports merging of the created single deliveries to one. This will reduce downtime of the system.

Prerequisites

Important: The included deliveries must have been built in an uninterrupted sequence and the delivery folder copied with unique names to a location, e.g. c:\multideliveries. The included deliveries to merge have to have been created in the same release, e.g. 23.2 deliveries can't be included in merge with delivery from 24.1.

The latest installer from the release of the deliveries should be used both when creating the multidelivery as well as when running the installation. Note: For Remote deployments the latest installer is probably the one in the last delivery in the multi delivery

The order of the single deliveries can be defined by creating a file named deliveries.txt in the top folder (e.g. c:\multideliveries). The default order is the alphabetical order, but if that doesn't correspond to the uninterrupted build sequence, the deliveries.txt should be created with the correct order, one row per single delivery.

Example:

Merging the delivery

Merging deliveries means that the files in each single delivery will be copied to a new location, in defined order, overwriting existing previously copied files.
When the merging has been completed, a file named Merged_Deliveries.log has been created in the new location. It contains information about the included single deliveries, listed in the defined order.

Merging database files
The database sub folders will be copied in sequence and the files calling these single files in the subfolders will be regenerated, as well as the tem files and install.ini file. Also the database installation scripts will be regenerated which will lead to different installation order than when installing deliveries in sequence.

Validation of delivery order
Deliveries created by the LE build process will contain a file named deliveryid.txt in the database folder. The file contain information about the delivery id as well as which delivery this actual delivery is based on. When running the merge of deliveries, this information will be analyzed, meaning the second delivery in chain must be based on the first delivery, the third delivery must be based on the second delivery and so on. This validation can be skipped by adding parameter deliveryValidationEnabled=false when running the script, in a situation when you want to force an unsequenced delivery to be created.

Note! The merged import of data will be performed after the deployment of the database code. The order of import will be different than when deliveries were installed in sequence.

Running the script

The script will be found in ifsinstaller/utils folder and it's documentation will be found here.