Views and Forms Deployment

[asifnoor]

In this article, i will explain you the issue that i have recently faced with the deployment of views and form changes.

This is pretty straight forward deployment in general, but when there are field changes and new field additions and if your SN database is huge, then there are few challenges that were noticed. I am sharing them here based on the debuggings that i did with the team.

We basically added new fields to our table, and then configure those new fields to the newly created view, created more sections in the form using the form designer. 

And then we deployed the updateset from dev to test instance. It took few hours to finish the deployment and then we noticed that the view is not showing it correctly. The fields are created in the backend, the view also exists but the view is not showing the fields. When i go to form design, the sections are present, but the fields inside those sections are empty. When you check in backend, the fields exist.

So we started debugging and then made few changes manually to the form in dev and pulled again, same issue. Exported the xml of view from dev and tried to import in test instance. Did lot of iterations with differnet approaches.

After few hours, the fields started showing in view by itself and that has nothing to do with our changes. Thats when we realized that whenever there are new field addition happens, because of huge data in the backend, the db changes took time to reflect (bcoz of indexing running in backend) and in between we started doing the corrections, assuming there is something wrong.

When we discuss with the platform team and few other experts, they recommended to separate the field changes and form layout changes in 2 separate update sets. Push the field level changes first and then make the form layout/view changes after that.

Also, whenever you make form changes (thorugh form designer), then following entries should be captured in the update set.

• 1 entry containing form section (in the payload, you should see details of all form sections of that form)
• Multiple form layout entries (The number of form layout entries should be qual n+1, where n refers to the number of sections in the form. If the form contains 4 sections, then you will see 5 form layout entries in the update set)
• 1 entry to the UI view itself

Whenever a new view is created, the update set will capture by default all form layouts and sections along with the UI view itself. If you notice any of the above is missing, then you might have to debug before you deploy. 

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

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