16. Feature Set Deployment

Feature Set Deployment (FSD) is advanced functionality which is not typically required for the deployment of applications but facilitates the non-standard and/or more complex deployment model required by LANSA business partners and larger organizations. It provides these main features:

• Solves the need to optionally install and uninstall parts of an application.

• Provides the ability to package up multiple artefacts into a single executable, including 3rd party installations.

• Enables an EPC or even a LANSA major release to be deployed as a patch. This speeds up the deployment to very large installations where a Major Upgrade is effectively not a suitable mechanism to deploy any application changes as it just takes too long. Note: There are technical restrictions, described later, which break patching and force a Version to be used.

• Allows the release cycles of customised parts of an application and add-ons to an application to be independent of the core or base product. As LANSA application objects are backward compatible there is no need to enforce a re-release of those objects when the core runtime changes.

• Supports optional features or Feature Sets. That is, installing multiple LANSA MSI into the one LANSA directory structure.