KB410131: How to copy or transfer the Mobile Configurations from one server to another when multiple mobile servers are used on Microstrategy Mobile

There are situations in which a customer can have multiple mobile servers where Strategy Mobile is deployed.
It can be required that mobile devices are able to access any of the available mobile servers, for instance when a load balancer is used to direct connections from mobile devices to servers. This would require the creation of the same mobile configuration across all the servers.
In Strategy Mobile 9.x and 10.x, there is no automated way to copy the mobile configurations across servers. The following directions allow to manually copy the configurations from one mobile server to another.
 

Mobile Configuration Files

The mobile configurations are stored on XML files on the Strategy Mobile application deployment folder. The files are stored on the following location:

<Mobile Application Deployment Path>/WEB-INF/xml/mobile

There are two types of files that store the information:
mobileConfigurationIndex.xml: this file stores a list of configurations that have been defined on the mobile server, and points to each mobile configuration that has been stored with a particular code under the same folder.
mobileConfig-<code>.xml: contains the information for the mobile configuration identified by on the mobileConfigurationIndex.xml file.
 

Mobile Configuration copy options

You can follow two procedures to perform the mobile configuration copy from one server to another:

• You can setup all the configurations on one Mobile Server, and then copy the file mobileConfigurationIndex.xml and all the mobileConfig-<code>.xml to the folder /WEB-INF/xml/mobile on the destination Mobile Server.  
• If you have already setup some configurations on each machine, you can copy the tags identifying the mobile configuration that you wish to copy from the file mobileConfigurationIndex.xml to the destination mobileConfigurationIndex.xml and copy the corresponding mobileConfig-<code>.xml files.

 

Copying index and configuration files from one server to another

1. Locate the folder WEB-INF/xml/mobile on the folder where the Mobile application has been deployed on the application server.
2. Copy all the contents of this folder to the same folder on the destination server.
3. Edit the config files to find and replace any server name changes to match the new environment.

Using this procedure, any configurations previously created on the destination server will be lost.
 

Editing the index file and copying selected configuration files

In this case we need to copy only some of the configurations to the destination mobile server. We will then copy the corresponding section of the mobileConfigurationIndex.xml file and the corresponding mobileConfig-<code>.xml files.
For this example, we will have a source mobile server with a configuration called "New Configuration" that we will copy to the destination server, where there already exist two configurations, named "Configuration Local" and "10.16.155.86".
To copy the configuration named New Configuration, open the file mobileConfigurationIndex.xml, and identify the configuration on this file. Each configuration is defined between XML tags <cnf>
On the source file, the tag defining this configuration is

<cnf n="New Configuration" cid="bbc1d570-4752-4958-921c-48aee52fa376" dt="2"><lnk am="1" rt="0"/></cnf>

 

This tag needs to be copied to the destination mobileConfigurationIndex.xml, and has to be placed in between the tags <cnfs>. The resulting XML file will have the following form

<cnfndx v="0" bld="9.0.628.176J"><cnfs><cnf n="New Configuration" cid="bbc1d570-4752-4958-921c-48aee52fa376" dt="2"><lnk am="1" rt="0"/></cnf><cnf n="Configuration local" cid="ac2b9a3a-268d-4805-9601-11d38f6014fd" dt="2"><lnk am="1" rt="0"/></cnf><cnf n="10.16.155.86" cid="7e0ec65b-ddcb-4f35-a783-1d638e557968" dt="2"><lnk am="3" rt="0"/></cnf></cnfs></cnfndx>

 
where there were already two configurations defined, "Configuration Local" and "10.16.155.86".  
Then locate the configuration XML file that you need to copy to the destination folder. To do this, locate the <cid> tag within the configuration, which contains the code used to identify the  in this example, the file is

mobileConfig-bbc1d570-4752-4958-921c-48aee52fa376.xml

 
Copy this file to the destination server, on the corresponding folder  WEB-INF/xml/mobile.
 

Final Steps

After performing the changes, restart the Application Server.
Then, launch Mobile Administration > Mobile Configuration and open and save each mobile configuration.
The reason for this is that it adds the new fields in the mobile configuration page to the config.xml files. It also increments the cntr parameter in the case you have used a customized mobile app with the the UseBundledPreferences/UpdatedExistingPreferences flat enabled.
 

Additional Considerations

Always make sure that the configuration names are unique.
 
KB410131