Jarvis Pizzeria: Deploying and Reverting to Snapshots

When working on a PCS application, you save and publish your changes often. However, when you publish a certain state of the application, you can decide to create a snapshot of this state of the application.

This can be very helpful if the publish represents a certain version of the application. Later these snapshots can be deployed or reverted to in case you want to roll back to a previous version. It is also possible to see what was in the application at the time of the snapshot creation.
In this blog we will show you how to work with snapshots.

When publishing, in the popup on the right hand side there is a option to ‘Make Snapshot’, when this checkbox is checked you can enter a name for the snapshot, in this case the snapshot will represent Jarvis 1.0!

After the Changes have been published and a snapshot is created we go to the deploy screen by clicking the deploy button.

Now when we select to deploy a new version, we can not only select the last published version, but we are also able to chose the created snapshot Jarvis 1.0.

In the deployment menu we deploy with revision 1.0 as well, to keep things consistent. It might be nice if you can create a snapshot with a certain version which automatically correlates to the revision id of the application, but we will put that on the wishlist for now.

When the deployment is successful it will be shown in the My Server tab as a deployed version.

Now, lets say we implemented some minor changes in the application and we want to publish a version 1.1 of the application. When publishing the last changes, we create another snapshot and call this 1.1.

Within the deployment menu, you can see that we can now select both snapshots of the application to deploy.

And once deployed, we see both versions in the table layout of the deployments.

If we check our work with a postmen Rest call, we see that both the version are currently active and can be called.

Since we did not make the 1.1 version default, the default version of the process is still 1.0. So be aware of all the options you have during deployment. Creating snapshots and different revisions of your application can be very powerful. Let's say we did make the 1.1 default and deleted the 1.0 version. If we find a bug and we can not fix it in time, we can always decide to redeploy the 1.0 snapshot and have the application and our processes once again running in that state. A very powerful tool. We can also revert the whole application to a specific snapshot.

By opening the menu and clicking ‘Snapshots’ or by selecting the blue ‘Snapshots’ button on the right within the Recent Activity window on the homepage we open a popup.

In here we can add more snapshots or delete the ones we have if they become obsolete. This way you do not end up with a lot of old snapshots that you never use anymore. But when selecting a specific version of the snapshot, it will also open this snapshot and revert the application to this specific version.

This screen however is read-only, it is not possible to make edits to a snapshot. However it can still be very nice to see what the state of this application was, you can open all the processes, forms, integrations and see how they were configured at the time of the snapshot.

In case you want to continue working on a previous version, there is a work-around to avoid the read-only application. For this export the snapshot and import it again as a new application, now the new application will be editable again.