Friday, October 16, 2009

Documentum Composer Wrestles with Lifecycles

Hosed by Composer again! Whoever thought Composer was ready for primetime with Lifecycle management was really in the clouds. Here’s what happened:

  • I created a Composer Project (call it Poser) and a new lifecycle (let’s call it DOA) along with many other artifacts.
  • I installed the Poser.
  • DOA had issues with ACLs and was not working correctly
  • I thought it would be better to create a delta dar for modifying just DOA
  • I created Composer Project 2 (Hoser) and imported DOA from the repository
  • I fixed DOA and installed Hoser.
  • Now Webtop showed 2 DOA lifecycles.
  • Naturally I deny that anything wrong is happening and I choose the wrong DOA, try it and get frustrated.
  • I DQL, I look at ACLs, I search Powerlink, I download Doc App Builder 5.3sp65
  • So I go back to Hoser, import the original DOA and click the “uninstaller” checkbox to uninstall both DOAs.
  • I install the Hoser again.
  • Now Webtop showed the original DOA still installed…What the? What got uninstalled?
  • At this point I installed Documentum App Builder, created a docapp, imported the lifecycles and uninstalled them. I fixed the DOA and had no other issues. This is still the true work horse!

Bottom line: once you create a lifecycle and actions, stick with that project, don’t create new projects using the original artifacts.

1 comment:

Saurabh said...

Hi John,

I am using D6.5 sp2 composer and struggling with my custom lifecycle.I created my custom lifecycle which is a copy of the web publisher default lifecycle with some changes.When I try to checkin the DAR to the repository, the installation fails saying that "could not notify user as the user "abc" does not exist.".The user abc existsin the repository and the lifecycle getting uninstalled ..as per the error message.......isnot the lifecycle I am trying to checkin.

This bug was reported in D6.5 sp1 composer and supposed to be fixed in sp2 , but doesn't work yet.following up with EMC support but any idea what's going wrong?