From my understanding, SP config APIs are used for configuration object export and import (into same or different tenant) in JSON format, whereas the configuration hub is used for backup and restoration purpose as well for code promotion.
Query:
Can the backup created via the configuration hub be exported or will it only be available within the SaaS platform and cannot be exported to an external storage?
If the client needs to have the configurations exported and stored locally and checked against the environment before making any new changes, which approach is preferred ? Is it SP-Config API or configuration hub?
If we are promoting the configurations (from sandbox to prod) using configuration hub, what all needs to be taken care? Is there any specific order to be followed ?
Heard that the SP-Config import APIs will be extended for all the configuration objects, anyone here is aware of any tentative dates on this?
Hi, the sp-config APIs are legacy APIs that supported export/import for 5 configuration objects. We recently added support for export additional objects via APIs but not the import. With configuration hub, we built more advanced, comprehensive and secure way (prevent accidental import of wrong configs) to manage configurations, by using built-in and customer configurable tokenization for attribute values and include reference checks to reduce import errors.
These are currently available via configuration hub UI only and we call these advanced actions: ‘configuration backup’ and ‘deploy’. Deployment of a backup to the same original tenant is what we call ‘restore’. deploying configuration from another tenant is cross-tenants config migration (promotion) .
to your questions:
1.2. these are same json configuration format in the config hub backup files and the sp-config export API , so for now you can use the sp-config APIs to export any configuration.
we are working on a solution to have the option to sync all the tenant backups into a customer defined cloud storage / AWS S3
2. we are also working on enabling APIs for config hub actions to upload a json configuration file into config hub to be processed via UI (compare against the live tenant environment etc.)
3. when you create the Draft for deployment via configuration hub, it will include only the differences between that backup and the live tenant (new and modified configuration objects). During Draft creation process, config hub will check all references and dependencies, will apply the tokenization / attribute substitution rule, and have the configuration draft available for review and deployment.
you will have summary of the reference / dependency errors in the draft summary and details in each object details.
4. We are not planning to extend the sp-config import APIs for more objects but to enable public API access to the newer APIs that are used by config hub to do all the mentioned above, which are safer and should reduce accidental imports of configurations on wrong tenants