Rational® Product Updater provides
support for using local copies of product update sites and for controlling
update policy. This lets you change the locations that get searched to find
product updates and optional new features.
By default,
Product
Updater uses
a URL that is embedded in each installed Rational software development product
to connect to an IBM
® update server on the Internet and search for product
updates and optional new features. If your organization has many users of Rational software
development products, you might prefer to construct a local copy of the update
site. Here are some reasons for creating a local update site:
- You want to reduce bandwidth demands caused by many developers downloading
large product updates or optional new features.
- You maintain a secure local intranet and your developers do not have access
to the default update sites.
- You may want to enforce local "update policy" and have control over what
product updates or features are made available to your developers. For example,
your company's local support staff may not be ready to handle questions about
new updates or optional features right away. They may therefore want to restrict
updates and fixes to an internally approved list.
Once you have constructed a local update site, your developers can use
Product
Updater to install updates
and optional features from the local site.
You can set up a local update site on a server connected to your network
(behind the firewall). This update site can be a subset of the product's update
site on the Internet because it can contain only the updates and optional
features that you want to make available. However, since Rational software
development products normally use an embedded URL for Product
Updater to
search, it is necessary to provide redirection capability. This and
other update policy settings can be set by creating an update policy file
and configuring the Product
Updater tool
to use that file when searching. (see Changing the update sites preference)
Ideally, users would access the update policy file from a URL so that the
policy file could be managed by local administrators.
Update policy files
An update policy file is an XML file. It can have any name (it is usually
called policy.xml), but it must conform to the following document type definition
(DTD):
<?xml encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!ELEMENT update-policy (url-map)*>
<!ATTLIST update-policy
>
<!ELEMENT url-map EMPTY>
<!ATTLIST url-map
pattern CDATA #REQUIRED
url CDATA #REQUIRED
>
The elements of
url-map are described below:
- pattern - a string that represents prefix of a product identifier,
up to and including the complete identifier. An example is com.ibm.rational.application.developer.update.
The product identifier can be found by exporting a list of the Rational software
development products on your system. (Refer to Exporting a list of installed Rational software development products.)
The
pattern element has two distinct forms for distinguishing redirection for
product updates and new optional features:
- update - a product identifier ending with update (for
example, com.ibm.rational.application.developer.update) is paired
with a url element corresponding to the local (proxy) site for product updates.
- discovery - a product identifier ending with discovery (for
example, com.ibm.rational.application.developer.discovery) is paired
with a url element corresponding to the local (proxy) site for optional
product features.
- url - a string representing the URL or file path of the alternative
update site that should be used if the product identifier begins with the
pattern. If the string is empty, products matching the pattern will not be
updated.
The following is an example of an update policy file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<update-policy>
<!-- Mapping of feature pattern to update URL. -->
<!-- Empty URL means product will not be updated. -->
<url-map
pattern="com.ibm.rational.software.architect.update"
url="file:/C:/local_update_site/rsa/updates"/>
<url-map
pattern="com.ibm.rational.software.architect.discovery"
url="file:/C:/local_update_site/rsa/optional_features"/>
<url-map
pattern="com.ibm.rational.application.developer.update"
url="http://internal.ibm.com/rad"/>
<url-map
pattern="com.ibm.orca.product.updater"
url="http://server1/rational_updates/updater/site.xml"/>
</update-policy>
Note: URL's in the policy file that do not begin
with a leading "/" are interpreted as relative to the location of the policy
file. For example, if a policy file is in the location
c:\share\policy.xml,
and a site.xml file is in the location
c:\share\rsa\site.xml,
then the url-map in the policy file can be written as follows:
url="file:rsa/site.xml"
For more information on the use of policy files and common update policy
control, see “Eclipse Update Policy Control” in your product's online help.