For the past few weeks, we have been discussing how to manage tags within the Web UI Configuration Console. Once you have them in their appropriate bundles, the next step is creating that snapshot. A “create snapshot” link should appear on the bundle screen, which will bring up another screen when you click it. This is where you give it a specific name (we recommend including date and time) that will make it easy to locate among everything else.
Something to highlight when tagging items is that there’s an option to “tag known configuration” or “tag known related configured items.” If you're tagging a list view that has a custom user field on it for instance, this feature will look through anything else tagged with that user field to suggest other parts of the configuration you may have missed.
Once the snapshot has been created, you can go into the manage changes list and see all local snapshots. This includes any that may have been created from all your development activities, which will remain in your source environment while you’re working. The nice thing about this is you've got a couple different screens that show everything contained in the snapshot for ease of use, like the list of actual configured items, any tags linked to that item, as well as the LPL associated with that specific item.
Another thing we want to highlight here is this configuration versus the snapshot. If there have been changes made to a specific configuration item since the snapshot was created, those differences will be highlighted on the manage changes screen, allowing you to review everything and create a new snapshot so that you’re now ready to deploy some new code. This is a very nice tool to be able to look through all the changes that you’re working on or building out. Once you are satisfied with your snapshot, then you use the export function to dump the zip file to the FTP site before moving it from your source to your target. Once all that is done, then you can actually import the snapshot.
Join us next week as we discuss snapshot validation and why it is so important to the configuration process.
