Re: Deploying forms4.5 advice required.

.>We are in the middle of developing a form4.5 based application and are having
>some
>difficulty formulating a way of deploying the applications to users.
>
>What we need are three distinct setups:
>
>a development setup
>a demonstration/testing environment
>a live/production environment
>
>Currently we just have a development environment set up for out forms 4.5
>work but
>urgently need to set up a method to allow user to run forms against a demo
>database
>instance and a live database instance
 

>Unfortunately we've encountered problems with setting up paths for the
>executable so only
>demo forms can be run against the demo database and live form against the
>live database
>and not viceversa which would cause massive problems.
>
>We don't really want to hard code paths into the applications since we'd like
>them to be
>as portable as possible.
>
>Has anybody encountered this scenerio already and how did you implement a
>solution.
>
>Any help/advice gratefully received
>
>Jon.
>
>j.m.whitehead_at_sheffield.ac.uk
>
>

From your message, I don't know what you are deploying on. I will tell you some of the things I have done, deploying on WINNT, SQL*Net2.Maybe some will help you out.

1. Define a couple of alias in c:\orant\network\admin\tnsnames.ora, that point to the INSTANCE each of the three deployment enviroments are on (hopefully they are on different instances or servers). (Multiple alias can point to the same place)
2. Instruct the user of the correct alias to use for each environment, or replace the login screen with something that makes it even easier for the users.
3. Define a standard directory structure, from your application down. Use relative directory references in your code, (..\ kind of thing). The top level differentiates dev/test/prod, but the structure below is identical
4. Create icon(s) on the desktop that run the runform executable, but have the working directory pointing to the appropriate top level. As you reference other forms, menus, etc using the ..\ kind of notation, everything should work out fine w/o source code changes as you go through the phases