collection element associated with artifact type empty

Products

• CA Release Automation - Release Operations Center (Nolio)
• CA Release Automation - DataManagement Server (Nolio)

Issue/Introduction

“ROC - Assign environment package" assigns an environment artifact package to a deployment, yet the associated artifact collection element does not populate so the distributed artifact package cannot be processed in a collection element loop flow.

Cause

The collection element is populated with the artifact versions once the “ROC - Assign environment package" is executed. If an empty package is assigned which versions are added to later on using “ROC – Add version to artifact package”, that means the collection element is empty yet the package is distributed well. This prevents a (pre)deployment step to process the versions in a looped flow. 

Environment

Release Automation 6.x

Resolution

Before assigning the artifact package (using “ROC - Assign environment package") to the deployment, make sure it contains all versions, either by:

• creating the package from the ROC UI
• including the versions in the xml definition of the package, e.g.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> 
<p:package xmlns:p="http://www.example.org/ArtifactPackage"> 
<p:name>Package22</p:name> 
<p:artifactVersionByPath> 
<p:definition>artdef1</p:definition> 
<p:type>arrttyp1</p:type> 
<p:version>artver1</p:version> 
</p:artifactVersionByPath> 
<p:artifactVersionByPath> 
<p:definition>artdef1</p:definition> 
<p:type>arrttyp1</p:type> 
<p:version>artver2</p:version> 
</p:artifactVersionByPath> 
</p:package> 

• add versions to the package with action “ROC – Add version to artifact package”

Additional Information

Artifact versions that are added after the package is assigned to the deployment are still distributed to the agents. It's just not possible to process them in a collection loop. But they are within the target's artifact_store and can be referenced there as such.