When I want to move all my updates from a DEV instance to a PROD instance, I create an LCA. I am careful to update the version numbers on all my processes so that when I import the LCA, the updated processes will be imported into PROD. If the process in the LCA has the same version number as the process on PROD, it won't import.
I have not been able to figure out how to accomplish the same thing with a DSC. At this time, I move my components manually from DEV to PROD and I either
Patch an installed component, which will update the component version (look at AdminUI), but does not update the version in the name. It will still say XYZService:1.0
Remove the old component, install the new component. This will show the new service name as XYZService:1.1
The problem with this is
Its a manual process that takes time
if I ever had a need to roll back a component, I can't. To solve this, I keep a copy of each version of the JAR file I used to install the component. I can always roll back "manually". This is completely different than processes of course, which is a simple matter of deactivating the latest version.
One of my thoughts was to create a 2nd <service/> element in my component.xml, but that seems like a lot of work. What happens when I am on version 1.12?
Anyone have any thoughts on best practices in managing components between DEV and PROD instances?
Have you looked into using ANT to deploy your DSC to your livecycle server? That way you can uninstall and re-install with the new version of the DSC whenever you build/compile the component.
