Menu maintenance issue

We are on E1 9.0 and have run into a menu maintenance issue. Currently, whenever we have had menu changes, we've just made them directly to the various environments, but I know they can be promoted via OMW as well. I haven't had the responsibility of managing menus until now.

Our issue was that when we recently refreshed our DEV environment from Production, we restored PRODCTL and PRODDTA and the result was that recent menu changes made in DEV were no longer there. We've had few menu changes so this hasn't been an issue but is now with some current major developer we have going on.

So the basic questions I have are.
1. How are people typically handing menu revisions. Do most use OMW and promote and deploy menu changes as any other changes like for UBEs and Apps? Or is making the changes directly in the environments typical also. Whats the norm or standard in JDE E1 currently.
2. Or does anyone have a recommendation on perhaps how to not have the menu definition overwritten when you do a data refresh. Perhaps certain files to not copy or restore? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Generally, we do our menu maintenance in DV and then promote to PY and then PD using OMW. It's really pretty easy to do, perhaps with the exception of having to do menu deletions.

Beyond that, you may want to better coordinate your environment refreshes with the group in charge of your major development, as your refresh could not only be endangering menu setup but possibly also versions being created in DV.

My 2 cents.

jimmymac,

We do all of our menu maintenance in DV and promote them through as with any program change. For us there's just too many menu-related variables that can make the environments behave differently. Also, to have all of our users suddenly see new menu options in prod without having done at least some cursory testing is too risky.

It is somewhat complicated to manage but can be done. As Don notes, deleting is probably the most challenging.

For our environment refreshes, we refresh the entire data library, but for control tbles we only refresh F0002, F0004 and F0005.

Thanks all. Certainly sounds like promoting through OMW is the way we need to go. Now I'm going about seeing if everything is defined to allow us to do that. Oracle documentation says to verify that all appropriate transfer activity rules are setup.
However, when I go into OMW and add a task id to a project, for example, I do not have the ability to do a Check out. A question I would have is when performing menu changes, do you do the same basic things as if you were doing a change to a UBE? That is, do you check out, design, check in?

If so then there is some setup left for us to do. But I'll start with that question. Do I do a checkout/in of task objects in OMW?

jimmymac,

I've never done a check out/in or Design within OMW for tasks and task relationships. I generally just make these changes in the menu on a DV fat client, and then add them to the OMW project. Then I use the promotion process to move these changes to PY and then to PD.

We setup the menus then copy the following control tables from SBCTL(DV) to CRPCTL & PRODCTL.

F9000
F9001
F9002
F9005
F9005D
F9006
F9006D
F9020
F9022

Re: RE: Menu maintenance issue

Thanks cody_bell. So you guys don't actually use OMW to promote menu changes, you just copy the related menu tables from DV to PY then to PROD? Interesting. I like straighforward approaches.