Mastering the Configuration Center: A Practical Guide

As instance-sync for MDF objects is going to be deprecated in the upcoming release (1H 2023), there is no better time to explore and start using the configuration center that is the upgraded alternative to the instance-sync tool and most probably replace it completely sometime in future.

The primary difference between the two is instance sync works in full purge mode whereas CC works in incremental mode where config specific to target tenant doesn’t get impacted, considering that it would be more logical to have both the tools serving different purposes or either to include full-purge mode as well or config comparison option in CC

Configuration center was introduced during 1H2021 release and from then it enhanced with few additional functionalities but application areas where CC can be used is limited to EC, Succession and PMGM (introduced in 2H 2021)

Hierarchy wise in CC, there are configuration areas which further classified into configuration groups that contain the configurations which can fall into either one of these 3 types of configurations, 1) MDF object definitions 2) Feature configurations (provisioning settings) and 3)System configurations (application level settings)

There are two types of configuration groups

Classified: These are the configuration groups which can be accessed from CC

Miscellaneous: These are other standard and custom configurations that are not part of any classification groups and should be accessed out of CC. As of now, only MDF objects fall under this category which was introduced in the last release (2H 2022)

Functionalities of Configuration Center:

Download of configuration:

CC can be used to take the backup of configuration in download mode. As of now, backup of configuration can only be done for the configurations which are part of classified configuration groups

Choose the required configuration area and expand the configuration groups using expand icon to find the concerned configuration group or type, click on it to get the available configurations on right side window

Once you select the checkbox of configuration, you’ll be prompted to enter the download request name. Once that’s done you can add as many as configurations as needed before initiating the request (Caution: You need to complete right from creating download request to submitting the request in one go as download request is not stored anywhere to do it in chunks)

You can find your request under the download requests tab where you can download the configuration in zip folder and save somewhere as required.

Transport of configuration:

As you can guess, it should be done in transport mode but unlike in download mode, here you can consider both classified and miscellaneous configuration groups as shown later

Instead of selecting the configuration first, you need to create the bundle first to which you can add the required configurations.

You can add the configurations in chunks until it’s released for transport. You can edit it to take you to the configuration activities section to add further configurations

For adding non-classified MDF objects, go to configure object definitions to add the required object to the transport bundle

Once all the configurations are added to the bundle you can initiate the transport and give the target tenant details

You can see all the selected configurations under respective configuration groups and click on transport to submit the request

Once all the configurations are exported into the bundle, its would be updated to transported

Transport request will be ready for import which you need to perform in target instance

In target instance, go to import section of transport requests to find the bundle and select validate from the action

Once configurations are validated successfully, bundle would be ready for import

You can see the report after validation or import to check the status for each configuration, it would be more helpful when you encountered errors

That’s the end of the blog. Though CC is at nascent stage, its UI is more user friendly than instance-sync and will be your tool of choice for transferring configurations as soon as you start. This was published before 1H 2023 changes, you can refer this post to know the latest updates in CC

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