GIS Administrators, DBAs, and IT Professionals responsible for managing multiple system environments all know what a huge challenge it can be.  Issues found in a PROD environment may not occur in the DEV environment used to fix those issues.  

Applications don’t behave the same way in TEST as they do in the training environment.  Identifying a root cause can take days (or weeks)!

Pinpointing the reasons why with the available tools often means extracting that information from cryptic product tables or comparing property dialogs for every table and every feature class in every database instance.  Administrators have very few tools to verify that a new environment has been properly restored or rebuilt.

The services team at SSP has been using their own tools for years to help quickly solve these problems.  One of the most valuable tools is the ArcFM™ XML Properties “XML Compare Tool”, which takes ArcFM™ XML Exports from different databases and compares them to identify the following configuration differences for each included feature/object class all the way to the subtype:

• ArcFM™ Properties
• Autoupdaters
• Object Model Names
• Field Model Names
• Snapping
• Relationship Classes
• Custom Objects
• Domains
• Field Indexes

If you’re reading this article, you probably know that the majority of ArcFM™ and Designer™ Product functionality as well as custom functionality depends on the proper configuration and assignment of model names to feature classes, object classes, and fields in the database.

Further, the update of key operational data depends on the proper assignment of AUs.

Due to the lack of tools for identifying configuration differences between environments, identifying issues has always been fairly reactionary.  When issues or occur in a production environment, usually the first place to go is the test environment to see if the problem can be reproduced.

Prior to the Model Names tab being added to the ArcFM™ Properties dialog, administrators had to connect to the database, and open the ArcFM™ Properties dialog and search through tabs for each feature or object class, potentially causing an issue:

To check field model names or autoupdaters assigned to fields, the administrator had to click on every field to see the configuration, and that’s just for a single feature class in one environment.  After the Model Names tab was added to the ArcFM™ Properties dialog, the finding assigned Model Names became a bit easier but still very tedious for comparing environments:

With the ArcFM™ XML Compare Tool, administrators can use the ArcFM™ XML Export tool to export the entire ArcFM™ configuration for each database environment.

The tool accepts two XML documents: configuration for the control environment, and configuration for the comparison environment.  It then produces a report detailing the differences:

The following shows how the report details similarities and differences:

The report details the configuration differences in the comparison environment from the control environment.  When the configuration types match between two different feature or object classes the report indicates “MATCH.”  Note the report goes down to the configuration for each subtype.

If you don’t need to compare everything in the database, using ArcFM™ XML Exports naturally allows you to focus the tool on a subset of the configuration within the environments.

It’s recommended that the tool is run each time a new environment is built or restored to proactively identify and fix discrepancies.  As one of the experienced developers at SSP, Chris Wittenberg, notes: “Having a tool like this is invaluable, as it saves from wasting time figuring out why their changes in their development environment don’t translate well to test or production. By knowing these environmental differences ahead of time, users can prepare them and save themselves from painful debugging headaches going forward.”