How to have a clone of systems with same data as production servers

Question

We have PLM systems where all our product lifecycle data resides. We want to build services (REST) to let this data accessed by other systems.

The PLM system we are using comes with REST services and we can also build our own on top of that.

These PLM Systems are our production servers and we don't want others to hit these services directly on the production servers. We can rehost other systems with production data but the rehosted system will not always be with live data as production systems.

Any thoughts to solve this problem?

Answer 1

I assume you meant PTC Windchill as your PLM system here.

When you're done with rehosting your prod to a new server, you can try the following things.

• Create listeners on your production server for the
  events(statechange,newVersion,checkout,checkin,etc.,) which you think you might want to capture when your production data changes.
• Write a REST service with your rehosted server url as the EndPoint . At the same time you should have a client class in the rehosted server to consume.
• In case of new parts or other objects being created in your production after rehost, when your listener captures that event, it needs to be exported as a jar file to a common folder location using ixb api's which the other server should have access to.
• You should have a folder watcher in the rehosted server which will be watching that common export folder for the new files. Once it finds a new file you can import the same using ixb into windchill. You can also write a windchill ScheduleQueue to do this activity on a particular time interval.

I hope this helps to start.