A lot has been made about the Pro/INTRALINK Data Migrator and the migration process.. Questions are abound about ‘how the software works’ and ‘how long will my migration take’. What perhaps has been neglected a bit is the discussion of getting the new system prepared for your eventual migration. It should be expected that a fair amount of time will be spent tailoring the newly installed system to meet your particular needs. This includes setting up of lifecycles, access control rules, setup of products and libraries, and object initialization rules; just to name a few.

One of the most fundamental configuration steps that in most cases will need to take place is configuring a revision and iteration scheme. I thought it would be worthwhile to spend some time on this subject as part of my migration blog. Why is it such an important subject? Well, out-of-the-box 8.0 and 9.0 use an alpha revision sequence (A, B, C, …) and the iteration sequence starts with 1, meaning the first version of an object will begin at A.1. This is different from the sequence previously used in Pro/INTRALINK’s out-of-the-box configuration, where the revision is numeric (1, 2, 3, …) and the version (analogous to 8.0 iterations) starts at zero, setting the first version of an object as 1.0.

Since the Pro/INTRALINK Data Migrator maps object versions based on their relative position within a sequence (i.e. out-of-the-box an object at 1.0 in 3.x would be set to A.1 in 8.0) it is highly recommended that an identical sequence be deployed in 8.0 as you had previously applied to your Pro/INTRALINK 3.x system. This requires some configuration.

In my next couple of blogs I thought I’d walk you through the steps required to configure PRO/INTRALINK to leverage a revision and iteration sequence identical to the previous out-of-the-box sequences used by Pro/INTRALINK. This week configuring your iterations to start with zero…

Configuring the Iteration sequence

Note: Before making any changes to configuration files it is always recommended that you backup the originals.

The first thing to do is to configure the system to have object iterations to start with zero instead of the default ‘1’. This can be adjusted by simply updating a property setting in one of the configuration files; specifically the wt.properties file.

Updates to properties files are implemented using the xconfmanager tool (DO NOT DIRECTLY EDIT PROPERTIES FILES). To make a change to the wt.properties file changes are first made to the wt.properties.xconf file. This file can be found in the <WT_HOME>\codebase directory. This file can be opened in any standard text editor.

Once the file has been opened search for the string wt.series.IntegerSeries.min. This should lead you to the line:

<Property default=”1” name=”wt.series.IntegerSeries.min”/>

By default this indicates that the iteration series is set to start at the value “1”. To have the system start at iteration zero the setting default=”1” will be replaced with default=”0”, such that the property is as follows:

<Property default=”0” name=”wt.series.IntegerSeries.min”/>

Next, save this change to the wt.properties.xconf file. Once the file has been saved the change has to be propagated to the actual wt.properties file using the xconfmanager utility. This can be simply accomplished by opening a Windchill shell and running the following command:

xconfmanager –p

This will propagate all changes made in xconf files into the appropriate properties files. Once xconfmanager has completed successfully, restart the Method Server to have the change take affect.

Next time how to define a customer revision sequence…