Update policy control and policy files

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: 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:
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.

Related concepts
Rational Product Updater overview
Related tasks
Changing the update sites preference
Exporting a list of installed Rational software development products
Creating a local version of the Rational Software Development Platform update server
Feedback
(C) Copyright IBM Corporation 2000, 2005. All Rights Reserved.