Best practice tips for maintaining an Innovator installation!

Hi Angela,

The first maintenance tip I'd suggest for anyone using a database-centered application like Aras Innovator is take regular backups of your database. How often to do this depends on how much the system is being used, but I'd recommend at least weekly if not daily backups. Accidents happen, servers crash, and knowing you have a backup will give peace of mind that you won't lose too much work. I'd also especially recommend taking a backup before any major configuration changes happen like importing a community project.

Besides that, there are a number of resources available online for maintaining and refactoring code bases. If you make heavy use of custom Methods, it'd be a good idea to occasionally go through the code base and refactor where appropriate. In terms of performance and efficiency, it'd be worthwhile to make sure all Methods are following the best practices by limiting the amount of calls to the server and limiting the amount of data returned. Some of these refactoring concepts can also be applied more generally to other items outside of Methods or code.

One suggestion when refactoring is to trim "dead code" that either doesn't affect the result of a program or was once used and has now been made obsolete. This concept can be applied to some code inside of a method, an entire Method, or even other items like Properties, Identities, Permissions, or whole ItemTypes. Perhaps a Property existed to store some data that's now being tracked another way or maybe a Group Identity was created for a temporary purpose and was never deleted afterwards. This kind of trimming should not be done lightly, but it can make maintenance easier since it limits the amount of items you need to look through. This is one example of a major configuration change that would warrant creating a backup before implementing. :) 

Another refactoring tip is to break up large chunks of code into smaller functions. Similarly, this concept can be applied to ItemTypes. If you have a single ItemType with 100 properties, it might be worth considering if it makes sense to split that up into several different ItemTypes.

To avoid too long of a response, I'll stop there. This is a great question though! I'm excited to see what other responses this gets. 

Chris

Christopher Gillis

Aras Labs Software Engineer

Hi Angela,

The first maintenance tip I'd suggest for anyone using a database-centered application like Aras Innovator is take regular backups of your database. How often to do this depends on how much the system is being used, but I'd recommend at least weekly if not daily backups. Accidents happen, servers crash, and knowing you have a backup will give peace of mind that you won't lose too much work. I'd also especially recommend taking a backup before any major configuration changes happen like importing a community project.

Besides that, there are a number of resources available online for maintaining and refactoring code bases. If you make heavy use of custom Methods, it'd be a good idea to occasionally go through the code base and refactor where appropriate. In terms of performance and efficiency, it'd be worthwhile to make sure all Methods are following the best practices by limiting the amount of calls to the server and limiting the amount of data returned. Some of these refactoring concepts can also be applied more generally to other items outside of Methods or code.

One suggestion when refactoring is to trim "dead code" that either doesn't affect the result of a program or was once used and has now been made obsolete. This concept can be applied to some code inside of a method, an entire Method, or even other items like Properties, Identities, Permissions, or whole ItemTypes. Perhaps a Property existed to store some data that's now being tracked another way or maybe a Group Identity was created for a temporary purpose and was never deleted afterwards. This kind of trimming should not be done lightly, but it can make maintenance easier since it limits the amount of items you need to look through. This is one example of a major configuration change that would warrant creating a backup before implementing. :) 

Another refactoring tip is to break up large chunks of code into smaller functions. Similarly, this concept can be applied to ItemTypes. If you have a single ItemType with 100 properties, it might be worth considering if it makes sense to split that up into several different ItemTypes.

To avoid too long of a response, I'll stop there. This is a great question though! I'm excited to see what other responses this gets. 

Chris

Christopher Gillis

Aras Labs Software Engineer