Using a development vault

Question

Hi All, 
 We have always had the difficulty of doing new development directly in the production vault as we have not been able to find an easy way to migrate changes from a "development" vault to a live one. 
 Has anyone found an efficient way to manage this or is structure export/import the only way to use this development strategy? 
 Chris

dejan · Answer

Hi there, 
 I have a quite a few vaults I maintain. 4 on cloud and 3 on-premise. They are all in sync. I do a lot of export/import but I am only focused on deltas (only parts changed) as new features arise. I never export/import the whole vault as it can bring side effects and problems are hard to find. I also generally develop on our development platform, move it to stable dev environment, then test and afterwards prod. So there is much testing and verifications between it comes on prod. It takes some time and discipline but it helps a lot to keep everything in sync and stable. 
 I would never recommend developing on prod (even changing some significant configuration there). The only thing I've sometimes did, is creating additional views first on prod and bringing them back on other environments. 
 You can however automate export/import through scheduled jobs but I personally don't tend to do this as manual imports are part of "deployment" and could be nicely reviewed with M-Files report. 
 Best, 
 Dejan

Joonas Linkola · Answer

You can find some best practices documented in Applying Controlled Changes to an M-Files System . This doc has been written with regulated industries in mind so the process may be unnecessarily heavy for your needs, but you can perhaps find some tips that make sense in your environment. This process does, however, still rely on the structure export/import that you are already familiar with, so no silver bullet found there.

Using a development vault

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