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Luke Wilby
Thank you for your interest in keeping IMS a vital and successful product. Software development has continuously evolved during IMS's lifetime, and so has IMS itself. We have kept pace with, adopted, and implemented many industry standard best practices within our organization, including Continuous Delivery, Design Thinking, and Agile.
When choosing new features to add from the list of requirements in our backlog, we assess which will bring the most value to as many clients as possible and prioritize those.
At this time, after reviewing this request for enhancement and assessing its potential value, we have decided to reject it. The reason we are rejecting RFE ID 98516 is because the deployment process for z/OS Connect and IMS Service provider has taken a different approach since V3 which provides a more standard approach and will ease integration of deployment in a DevOps process. The XML/mobile-config files scripting approach has been replaced by service projects/zconbt/service-properties/dropins sar files.
For an overview and samples of the z/OS Connect deployment process, see https://developer.ibm.com/mainframe/docs/devops-zcee/
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS4SVW_3.0.0/com.ibm.zosconnect.doc/overview/devops_bt.html
https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS4SVW_3.0.0/com.ibm.zosconnect.doc/designing/service_specify_properties.html
If you have any further questions about DevOps with z/OS Connect, feel free to contact us and we would be happy to help.
Thank you.
Haley Fung - hfung@us.ibm.com
My opinion is that you provided a decent interim workaround. I believe the original request would make it much easier to maintain and ensure environment consistency when moving configurations from one place to another--without having to worry whether the substitutions in a sed script really updated everything that needed it and nothing that shouldn't have been modified. And while regex is very powerful, even people with a Linux background can have trouble with it.
Additionally, since practically every shop will need to write the same set of (error-prone) scripts when they get to the maturity level of wanting to put these configs in a source control system and deploy them to other environments, IBM providing variable substitution would eliminate every shop from having to repeated reinvent the wheel to use zCEE in an enterprise fashion.
The recommended DevOps process for managing your Interaction Profiles and Connection Profiles goes as follows. You create the initial profiles onto a development environment zCEE server. You download the xml containing those entities from ...resources/imsmobile-config in order to store them in an SCM system. You then clone and edit those files for each target environment. Your scripting can be setup to upload the correct instance of the entity xml files that are appropriate for the target environment. The IMS Service Provider support for this DevOps process has been available since z/OS Connect EE V2 released. Would you please verify whether this process will work for you? If it will work we will close out this RFE. If not we'll need to discuss further.