Safety measures in deployment window (BC/AL)

Christoph_G

Hi Guys,

Happy New Year!

Since the introduction of AL apps it has become even more critical to prevent data changes in the system during app deployment windows.
Changes sources could be users, web services, job queues.

During app installation some of the existing ones are getting uninstalled and during that time their fields and code are unavailable, so any processing launched during that period can result in severe data loss or inconsistency. Thus in each window we must make sure no users are logged in, job queues are not running, web services are not used.

Normally we solve it by turning off appropriate services, but maybe you have some more elegant and quicker way of "locking" the system to unwanted changes.
I'd be grateful for any ideas. Thank you.

Magicman

How about switching it to single user mode?

Christoph_G

Hi Magicman,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

If you mean switching it on SQL Server then it's not always an option, as in case of some customers we don't have constant admin access to db servers.

Thus we're looking for some option excluding the need to do anything on db side.

Magicman

For users you could simply write a function in c/al which sets their default profile to an empty one and log them off by killing thier sessions. That doesnt help with job cues or system events though....

Christoph_G

I thought about it, as even JQ's and WS's need accounts to work.

However session management commands don't seem to work in every case. It happened that STOPSESSION in RTC sometimes did not kill session (MS docs say it can only kill idle/inactive sessions, but I've got an impression sometimes it had problem with idle sessions, too).

In BC Web Client sessions sometimes even seem not to care about Powershell commands raised as admin on middle tier server. What's even worse some sessions reappear even after service restart [sic!].