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Working with Data Environments

Introduction​

This tutorial teaches you about data environments and how to use them

Prerequisites​

User requirements​

This tutorial assumes some familiarity with writing code as we will be doing some basic coding in OpenDataDSL in Visual Studio Code

System requirements​

You will need to have the following:

About Data Environments​

A data environment is a physically independent environment where all your data, settings, workflows etc. reside. They can be used for anything, but usually you would create a develop, test or QA environment in which you can test or experiment with data or features of the application without compromising your pure production environment.

What is in an environment​

The following entities are stored in each individual environment:

  • Actions
  • Audit records
  • Calendars
  • Curve management information
  • Data
  • Extractors
  • Groups
  • Objects
  • Processes and process execution records
  • Report configurations and reports
  • Security Policies
  • Scripts
  • Subscriptions and subscription records
  • Transformers
  • Types
  • Workflows

Environment Quotas​

By default, your company has a maximum quota of 3 environment including your production environment. That means you can only create 2 more named environments, but you can request more by emailing info@opendatadsl.com or requesting via the web portal.

Managing environments​

You can create, list, use and delete environments in ODSL code.

Creating an environment​

The following code snippet creates an object called test (which will also be the name of the environment). It then sets a description of the environment, you can add any other properties you like on the object. Finally it saves the object using the environment service.

test = Object()
test.description = "My test environment"
save ${environment:test}

Using your new environment​

To use your newly created environment, you need to tell ODSL code with the use command.

use test

After issuing that command, any entity that is saved within the same session will be stored in the test environment.

Listing your environments​

To get a list of your environments, you can use the find command.

environments = find ${environment}

print environments

print "There are currently " + environments.size + " environments"

Each environment object contains the following properties:

NameTypeDescriptionExample
_idStringThe environment identifiertest
_createdByStringThe email address of the person who created the environmentme@example.com
_sizeNumberThe size of the environment in bytes12345
_timestampDateTimeThe UTC timestamp of when the environment was created2021-01-14T17:01:31.930Z
*AnyAny other custom properties you adddescription

Deleting an environment​

danger

Deleting an environment deletes ALL the data in an environment, so use with care

To delete an environment, use the delete command.

delete ${environment:"test"}
info

You can't delete the production environment