Publishing
The concept of publishing a configuration goes back multiple versions of SCS. As before, SCS administrators can continuously edit the sensor configuration in CFE without impacting the running SCS system (the Working Configuration). However, at some point the changes are ready to go live and be put to use by the rest of SCS. In order to push those changes into production the administrator has to perform a Publish operation.
Publishing your configuration takes any changes you have made since your last publish and makes them part of the active configuration used by all SCS systems. In other words, it tells all of SCS to start using the changes you have made in CFE.
You can only perform a publish operation if you have pending changes. You can determine this by looking at the main toolbar, if it is green then your Working configuration and your Published Configuration match. If not, then you have pending changes you can push to production when you are ready. To publish your sensor configuration simply click Publish from the Configuration dropdown located in the main toolbar or click the Publish button directly.
Unlike prior versions of SCS, new configurations published by CFE take effect immediately. SCS will not wait for a restart to integrate the changes, do not publish unless you are ready for your changes to go live.
When you perform a Publish operation the first thing that happens is your configuration is saved, then a full validation scan is done. If any validation issues are found you will have a chance to review (or ignore) them prior to completing the publish.
Once a Publish operation completes successfully the toolbar will turn green and all running SCS clients, from ACQ to charts, will take your changes into account. For instance, if you added a new COM port device, ACQ will immediately start reading from it, the datahub will immediately start sending it out and the auto-detection service will immediately stop listening on it. Similarly, if you edit any item which effects a template the template will be alerted that it may be in an invalid state and will let any user know that it may need attention. This doesn't necessarily mean it will stop working, templates will continue to operate regardless of changes made in CFE, however it may impact the result (for instance if you have a Real Time Display showing a sensor value, and you delete the sensor in CFE then the next time you launch the Real Time Display it cannot display that sensor value anymore, but it will start regardless).
Restarting of templates is no longer required for CFE changes to be reflected in them and templates will start even if publishes from CFE 'break' them.
If you are running the FSDB service then your new configuration will also be sent to shore and sync'd to any other SCS backup servers you have running on the ship.
When publishing you will have the option of providing a description. Entering something descriptive and meaningful can prove useful in the future when you look through your publish history to find the one you want during a Load Previous operation.