Transitioning WSRP producer registrations from development to production

Question

Hi there,
we're currently struggling a bit with the notion of producer registrations vs. the need for separating our development environment from production.
Here's what we do:
1. We create a producer connection in JDeveloper, but using the development server's portlet deployment as WSDL endpoint
2. We then continue to create some pages, instantiating portlets from the newly created producer as we go along
3. We deploy that to our development environment. All is well!
4. We (at some time in our projects lifecycle) try to go ahead and deploy to production. For that, we'd like to change the URL of the producer connection while preserving all the pages we composed (at design time), so far.
5. First, we simply change the producer url in connections.xml before starting to predeploy. -> Error, since the ID of the registration handle included in our local MDS doesn't match anything that exists in the actual production environment.
6. Next, we try to predeploy/deploy the EAR file as is, then change the actual producer URL using WLST (setWSRPProducer, registerWSRPProducer, degisterWSRPProducer, etc) or the Fusion Enterprise Manager. -> Doesn't work either, since deregistration/registration invalidates all the existing portlet instance files we have in our original MDS/MAR file.
So here's my question: What are best practices you can recommend when working with WSRP producers and a (clean) separation between development, testing and production environment? Are design-time producer registrations/portlet instantiations even possible in such a context? Should we perhaps use the preference data migration tool for migrating consumer registrations from one environment to the other? Even when one of those environments is unstable (dev) and the other supposed to be stable (production)? Or should we (at the portlet-level) disable consumer registrations entirely? If yes: How to do this in WebCenter?
Help is deeply appreciated :-)!
Cheers,
Chris
Edited by: ckesselh on Nov 3, 2011 8:14 AM

Answer 1

Hi Chris,
You raise good questions that I would love to explore further as well and it would be great if you could let me know what deployment approach you have come up with. Some of this is covered under section http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17904_01/webcenter.1111/e12405/wcadm_imp_exp.htm and http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17904_01/core.1111/e10105/deployer_role.htm which I am sure you have already reviewed. I have a much simpler problem with getting a Null Exception Error every time that I simply try to register a WSRP Producer with the sample .Net service - have you ever tried that and have come across the same issue?
Thanks,
Michael.