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[Gregory Alford]

We have 3 databases – LIVE, UAT, and DEVELOPMENT. We are on the spring 2019 edition of Business Central and we are on pure extensions.

We have been paying our partner to refresh our UAT and DEV databases every few months. Does anyone have instructions on how we can do this ourselves? We run a full backup to the cloud daily and one locally every Sunday. So having a backup of LIVE to restore is not an issue.

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Kyle Hardin]

I am going to assume since you can do your own backups and restores that you are onprem.

You’ll need to modify this to match your environment. It assumes two application servers and one SQL server. Run this from an elevated BC Administration Shell prompt. IT also renames a company so the new name has TEST at the beginning.

You could also write a small codeunit that updates Company Information to change the System Indicator, or anything else that Test would need like clearing out credit card numbers, or removing a check signature BLOB. This can be called with PowerShell with Invoke-Codeunit.

More detail is in this blog.

https://www.archerpoint.com/blog/Posts/using-powershell-refresh-microsoft-dynamics-business-central-prem-test-database

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Duluth GA
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[Gregory Alford]

Thanks – Unfortunately, that link does not work.?

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Kyle Hardin]

Can you get to the main blogs page?

https://www.archerpoint.com/blog

Then you can search for the word PowerShell.

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Duluth GA
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[Gregory Alford]

Yes I can .?

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Gregory Alford]

– scrolling through the blog posts, I finally did find the How-to. Thanks for your help. ?

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Gregory Alford]

– I just read through your post. There is nothing in there about how to handle the extensions. We have about 25 extensions in our system. ?

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Kyle Hardin]

If you are doing a SQL backup and restore, then the extensions move with the database. The new / refreshed UAT database will have the exact same extensions as Production. Maybe I don’t understand the question.

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Duluth GA
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[Gregory Alford]

– Our DEV never matches our LIVE and our UAT (User Acceptance Testing) will be different, too. I suppose the answer is to just reinstall the extensions that haven’t been moved to LIVE.?

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Kyle Hardin]

This article by Waldo describes how to use PowerShell to untangle the various app dependencies and make sure they get installed in the correct order. As for determining what belongs in DEV versus UAT or Live – that gets complicated and has to somehow be driven by your devops process. Depending on how you are doing your builds and branches, you might be able to do some sort of automated deployment.

https://dynamicsuser.net/nav/b/waldo/posts/app-dependency-tree-import-your-apps-in-the-right-order-with-powershell

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Duluth GA
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[Joe Draeger]

Hey Greg,

It also might be worth asking your partner to provide a detailed instruction set on what they are doing.  Paying them for the instruction write up may be a better value then paying them to to the refresh.

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Joe Draeger
Ortho Molecular Products, Inc
Woodstock IL
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[Mark Anderson]

Are you on prem or in cloud?

 

If on prem, isn’t it just a straight forward backup and restore in SQL?

 

Regards

 

mark

 

 

 

Mark Anderson | Director of ERP Systems

 

Mobile 312.576.4332 | Direct 847.448.4202

 

 

——Original Message——

We have 3 databases – LIVE, UAT, and DEVELOPMENT. We are on the spring 2019 edition of Business Central and we are on pure extensions.

We have been paying our partner to refresh our UAT and DEV databases every few months. Does anyone have instructions on how we can do this ourselves? We run a full backup to the cloud daily and one locally every Sunday. So having a backup of LIVE to restore is not an issue.

——————————
Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
——————————

[Gregory Alford]

We are on prem and it the extensions that are are being developed that I am concerned about.

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Gregory Alford
Director of Technical Resources
Tri Star Metals LLC
Aurora IL
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[Kyle Hardin]

You will have to have a powershell script, one per database that knows where the extensions are located on the file system. There would have to be some manner of Live / UAT / Dev structure, where the extension versions appropriate to that particular database are stored. PowerShell will allow you to automate the extension deployment, but the developers have to be disciplined (or the DevOps output) to store to the correct directories.

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Kyle Hardin
NAV Developer
ArcherPoint Inc.
Duluth GA
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