App Broker Database refresh activities

[Gauraav]

Hello

we are currently on App Portal 2019 R1 in production, and we recently upgraded staging environment to App Broker 2020 R2 for development work.

We are wanting to refresh all of the catalog items + all related configurations from production to staging for project, development, and testing purposes.

Is there any documented refresh plan / cloning plan / scripts that Flexera provides?

whether it's recommended to refresh only a certain subset of data tables? Appreciate any guidance on this request Flexera has. 

[CharlesW · Accepted solution]

No, not really.. Ideally, you would have a script to bulk import all of your catalog items using the API.. In the absence of this, then your best bet might be to create a backup of your production DB, and restore it into your test environments.. The latter approach may not always be ideal, as the references to SCCM collections, deployments, etc. would be different, if you were using a different instance of Config Mgr in your test environment.

[CharlesW · Accepted solution]

No, not really.. Ideally, you would have a script to bulk import all of your catalog items using the API.. In the absence of this, then your best bet might be to create a backup of your production DB, and restore it into your test environments.. The latter approach may not always be ideal, as the references to SCCM collections, deployments, etc. would be different, if you were using a different instance of Config Mgr in your test environment.

[jdempsey · Accepted solution]

And to add to what Charlie said about the SCCM collections and deployments, if you ARE NOT using a separate ConfigMgr environment between development and production (i.e. DEV and PROD App Broker, but only a single SCCM that is shared between them), then in that case, the deployments would work, but you run the risk that changing the deployment or archiving a catalog item in development will also impact production because it will remove the collection and deployment that production is using.  To avoid this, there is a column in the WD_SiteToAdvert table called [CreatedByAP].  If you set this value to 0, then App Broker will not attempt to remove the SCCM objects when archiving the corresponding catalog item.  However, in general, I don't recommend you try anything like this without a paid Flexera Services engagement.  Your best bet is Charlie's first suggestion of using PowerShell and the App Broker API's to bulk create your catalog items from a spreadsheet.  Then you'll still need to manually recreate questions, templates, workflows, etc.