Tech Talk

LIGHTLY TECHNICAL OBSERVATIONS ON PEOPLESOFT, SQR, AND RELATED AND UNRELATED TOPICS

Archives

If you use a tool such as Quest's Stat, you know that Application Designer can be run without human intervention. For example, it's possible to perform a project Upgrade|Copy operation in a batch, scripted way.

Here is an example. Suppose that we want to copy a project from our HRDEV environment to HRTST. A .BAT file containing the following, all on one line, should do it:

X:\HRDEV\BIN\CLIENT\WINX86\PSTOOLS.EXE -CT ORACLE
   -CD HRDEV -CO MYLOGINID -CP MYPASSWORD
   -TD HRTST -TO MYLOGINID -TP MYPASSWORD
   -LF "C:\TEMP\PS.LOG" -PJC MY_PROJECT_NAME

This command contains login information for the source and target environments, plus the name of the project and a log file location. Running the .BAT file should invoke App Designer in the source environment, load the project, connect to the target environment, and copy the project. All of this happens silently in the background. The log file will contain any error messages. It's a Unicode file, so open it with Notepad or another Unicode-aware editor (or you'll see strange characters).

There are other options to control the migration. You can also invoke App Designer to build a project. All of this is documented in the PeopleTools Command Line Parameters section of the PeopleTools Integration Tools and Utilities book.

Obviously, before using a technique such as this, you should be comfortable with the various Upgrade|Copy options and considerations. I'll cover some of those next week.