Develop > Presentation layer > Customize IBM Sales Center > Deploy customizations to the IBM Sales Center > Update mechanisms


Scan for updates

You can search for new versions of an Eclipse feature using manual or automatic update scans.

Installed Eclipse features can designate, in their feature.xml manifests, a URL locating an update site to be searched for new versions of that feature. 

<feature id="com.xyz.myfeature" version="1.0.0" label="My Feature">
<url>
<update url="http://xyz.com/updates/myfeature" label="XYZ Site" />
</url>
<!-- other content -->
</feature>

You can trigger scans manually using the Application Management user interface or automatically using scheduled updates.

Prerequisites:


Procedure

  1. Features installed with valid update URLs set in their feature.xml manifests.

  2. For automatic, scheduled updates, an appropriate org.eclipse.update.scheduler plug-in is also installed. Support for this plug-in must be obtained directly from the Eclipse open source project.


Results

To perform a manual update scan:

  1. Open the Sales Center in administrator mode.

  2. Select Application > Application Management.

  3. In the left pane select the product, or one or more features under the product. In the right pane, select Scan for updates.

To perform automatic update scans:

  1. Download the current compatible version of the org.eclipse.update.scheduler plug-in from http://update.eclipse.org/updates/3.0/plugins/org.eclipse.update.scheduler_3.0.1.1.jar.

    If this link does not work, go to http://www.eclipse.org/ and search for the org.eclipse.update.scheduler version 3.0.1.1 plug-in. The current compatible version is org.eclipse.update.scheduler version 3.0.1.1. Since this is an external plug-in that is not bundled with the WED client platform, IBM does not provide support for it. You must obtain support for this plug-in directly from Eclipse.

  2. Copy the org.eclipse.update.scheduler version 3.0.1.1 plug-in to the SC_installdir\rcp\eclipse\plugins directory.

  3. Restart the Sales Center application using the -clean runtime argument to load the plug-in.

  4. To confirm that the plug-in was installed, select File > Preferences to open the Preferences window.

  5. In the tree view, expand Install/Update > Automatic Updates to open the Automatic Updates preference page.

  6. Select the Automatically find new updates and notify me check box. By default, this option is set to false during the first startup.

    To set this option to true during the first startup, add the following parameter to the plug_customization .ini file: 

    org.eclipse.update.scheduler/enabled=true

    Currently, the Eclipse platform does not read this setting correctly. See Troubleshoot: Automatic update mechanism.

  7. Select the other automatic update options in the preference page. You can set the automatic update scan to be launched each time the client is started, or on a regular schedule.

Regardless of the mechanism that is used to locate and install updates, the updates do not become effective until you restart the client. In addition, the Scan for updates capability only finds equivalent or compatible versions, according to the preferences specified in the Install/Update dialog (Manage > Preferences > Install/Update). The default value is for equivalent updates.

Sometimes you might not want the client to connect directly to the site identified by a feature's update URL. Firewalls and Internet bandwidth limitations might make the original site unusable, or the correct URL might have changed since the feature was created. In addition, an organization might not want their users to download updates directly from an external provider, preferring instead to perform an internal review and approval process before making updates available.

You can use the Eclipse update policy file to redefine the update URLs of features by mapping them to alternate URLs listed in the policy file. It can redirect to a local mirror of the original site, or to a site whose contents have been vetted by the IT organization. This mechanism can also map placeholder URLs to the correct update site locators, if the proper URL was unknown when the feature was created; for this reason, it is advisable to always specify some update URL value when defining a feature. For more information, see Eclipse Update Policy Control in the Rational Application Developer Information Center. For more information, see Automatic Update Scheduler in the Rational Application Developer Information Center.


Related concepts

Update mechanisms

Deploy customizations to the IBM Sales Center

Related reference

Troubleshoot: Automatic update mechanism


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