With customer engagements in ALM and RLM 4.5 and prior, I found that customers often wanted to further automate portions of the out of the box workflows. The OOTB Release Package, Application Release, and Deployment Tasks, are all at their core just SBM workflows. Therefore, typical SBM customization to automate certain processes apply to Release Control as well. 

In RLM 4.5, a customer wanted to streamline the creation of a Release Package. Out of the box, a user was expected to create the following, assuming Dimensions was involved with baseline creation:

• a Related Project
• a Deployment Unit
• One or more Deployment Tasks

Each of these objects, involved selecting values including values from Rest controls. There were opportunities to automate the manual creation of these objects, since, for this customer case, much of the values were already known or could be derived in some manner.

I found that using app scripts for this type of automation was the ideal way to go, as the sheer amount of application logic made it more difficult with orchestrations. The creation of objects like the Related Project and Deployment Unit, involved creating auxiliary table items. The creation of Deployment Tasks involved creating primary table items. I created auxiliary tables as lookup tables, to store certain values that were used to supply values to the auto creation of Deployment Tasks, such as ownership, sequencing, titles, etc.  

The end result was a substantially reduced amount of manual clicks and decision making on the part of the user.