Change Assistant -- Apply bundles with “PeopleTools Upgrade option”

Change Assistant is all about EMF (Environment Management Framework). But at times, your infrastructure is like that which push you back not to configure the same in your environment. Also, in some cases, you can’t make your agents up and run say for example in PROD.

Now, you can skip doing below things to use CA if EMF is not configured:

-- Upload environment.
-- Go to Customer Connect. (No need if you know what your requirements are)
-- Download Change Packages. (You can do the same manually)

What you will not be able to do without EMF configured is “Apply change packages” step.


For that, we left with two options.

-- Use CA to apply software updates without using EMF.
-- Apply software updates manually (to be discussed in next blog).

Former step, (obviously not recommended by Oracle) eventually means “Applying bundles with PT Upgrade option”. Pain to using this option would be you need to keep a track of pre/postrequisites by yourself and you need to do some manuall steps. However, you will get the sequential orders of the steps to be run and also automatic steps will run by themselves which could make using this option bit different from option to apply software updates completely manual.

Below are the steps to achieve the same.

"Perform PeopleTools Only Upgrade" Option for applying bundles

“PeopleTools Upgrade only” option is primarily for the upgrade of PeopleTools lines (patches/fixes/PT upgrade). The basic difference between "PeopleTools Only Upgrade" and "Apply Application Updates" option is in "PeopleTools Only Upgrade" option, there will be one template can be loaded at one time, i.e. one jobset for one bundle.

Below are the steps which involved to create one job for one bundle using “PeopleTools Upgrade only” option to apply bundles.



Open Change Assistant; choose “Perform PeopleTools Only Upgrade Option”













Select New Environment
















Choose a meaningful name for this environment.














Setup your environment to fill with the options given













Fill the database options and TEST CONNECTION


























Finalize the options by clicking SAVE














Import the CA Template for desired Bundle














Create a New Job















Choose the desired template (In said example, I am applying GP Bundle # 7)














Select the environment (You have loaded earlier...)















Select the type of Upgrade









Your job starts now















Things need to be done manually:

-- You need to download the bundle/POC etc manually.
-- You need to unzip the same.
-- You need to create the job.
-- You need to import the template.
-- You need to create the directory structure manually and modify the scripts.


Step “creation of directory” and “modifying the scripts”:

When you tell CA what type of upgrade you want to do either “Initial Upgrade” OR “Move to Production”, CA creates a directory structure in “Staging Directory” like below:

/PRJ734353ML_XXXXX_Bundle7_MoveToProduction

PRJ734353ML ----------- Bundle name
XXXXX -------------------Instance name
Bundle7 ------------------ Bundle Number
MoveToProduction------- Type of upgrade you choose

Now when you will start the job, it will get fail with the error message “Script not found”. When you will go to the staging directory and open the said folder, chances are you will find the directory empty.

What you need to do is, copy all the folders from the UNZIPPED bundle directory (where you unzipped the bundle etc…) to the above location. Folders probably would be:

CopyObjectScripts
Data
Documentation
PRJ734353ML
Scripts

Now the next step “Modify Script”. (You may need not to do this if you copy the scripts from UNZIPPED folder. I did this because I copied the above folder from other environments staging directory, so the input files etc were already resolved/hardcoded by CA. This was due to the reason I use to make different staging and output directories per instance, like – Staging_instancename).

Say, for example, there is an automatic step “Import message Catalogue Definition”, which actually runs the datamover script “upd_msg_eng_i.dms”. When you will open the script, content will be like below:

SET INPUT D:\Staging_\softwareupdatePRJ734353ML{f781b618-f759-11dd-8039-816ad04724a0}\data\upd734353_msg_eng.dat;

So CA has already the OLD staging directory path where the input file is pointing.

As I said, this depends how your setup is and if you are copying the folders from UNZIPPED location, CA may be able to resolve the new path.

Also one more important thing. If you have applied the bundles anytime using CA and with "Apply Application Updates" option, you might have seen that in the end of each bundle, CA do an additional step: Update Package Prerequisites. Description below.

In the end, CA runs a script "prereqs_i.dms" to update the DB about the prerequisite info if you use "Apply Application Updates" option. You need to run this script manually in case you are using the option "PeopleTools Upgrade Option Only". SQL statement in this script is like below:

DELETE FROM PSPROJECTDEP WHERE PROJECTNAME=PRJXXXXX
INSERT INTO PSPROJECTDEP VALUES (PRJXXXXX,'XXXXX');

where XXXXX is your Bundle ID/Update ID. Remember, if you are applying multilingual bundle (for unicode database), then in inset statement, first value precedes with ML, but second value will not. For example, if you are applying Bundle '12345', Delete and insert statement would be like:

DELETE FROM PSPROJECTDEP WHERE PROJECTNAME=PRJ12345ML;
INSERT INTO PSPROJECTDEP VALUES (PRJ12345ML,'12345');


Hope this helps…comments/suggestions always welcome...