Sunday 21 October 2012

ACC Changes versus dyn/admin changes


Normally we always have a confusion on what is happening behind the scene when a change is made through dyn/admin to that of ACC

Changes made through dyn/admin are not written to the properties file so they will be lost once you restart the server. One pretty common scenario when we tend to change the component property values through dyn/admin is while diagnosing some problem as we may want to enable debug logs and any other types of output messages which can give us more information. 

When changing component property values from ACC, the changes are actually written to the corresponding component properties files and those properties file will go to the config layer with the highest precedence. And in case you want your changes to be written to a particular config layer then you can select that config layer also within ACC from the menu Tools -> Set Update Layer. By default the config layer at <ATG>/home/localconfig is at the highest precedence so if you don't explicitly specify any other config layer, ACC will write your changes at the component path within <ATG>/home/localconfig.

<ATG>/home/localconfig has a CONFIG.properties having the property defaultForUpdates=true which makes it the default for any updates. You can change this default by changing defaultForUpdates to false in <ATG>/home/localconfig/CONFIG.properties and create a CONFIG.properties with defaultForUpdates=true within your modules' config layer so that ACC by default can write your changes at the component path in your module's config layer.