Local or Global Replication?
The choice of replication should be carefully considered before a productive deployment of the Windchill Requirements Connector within an organization.
Local replication:
The local replication is stored in a file that is local within the exchange project. When opening the first roundtrip configuration within a project, the local replication store is locked. Therefore only one user can work with that project at a time. Each project will use a different replication store. The consequence is that if a requirement is exchanged by different projects, it will be assigned different replication identifiers.
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Local replication should be used by (smaller) organizations that do not distribute the requirement specifications further to third parties (e.g. should be used by end-tier suppliers).
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Global replication:
Using a global (distributed) replication ensures that a requirement is assigned a single, unique replication identifier, irrespective of where the requirement appears in exchange configurations. The same replication identifier will then appear at all locations (worldwide) with the same identifier. There is no limitation on concurrent usage of the global replication. The replication data for all projects is available in all projects, so there is no limitation on linking between documents residing in different projects. In contrast to the local replication, Windchill Requirements Connector needs a global replication configuration to access the global replication store. That configuration is created with the Windchill Requirements Connector Administration Tool once to configure host, port, database name, user and password for the database. All users of Windchill Requirements Connector will create entries in the global replication database with the configured user. Please contact your administrator for further reference.
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Global (distributed) replication should be used by (larger) organizations that need requirements to be tracked across their entire lifecycle irrespective of projects or exchange configurations (e.g. should be used by OEM or 1–tier suppliers).
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Questions to help you with the decision
• Do you need to export the same document in different projects with the same identity?
• Do you need to export or import the same set of documents in parallel?
• Do you need a central backup of the replication data?
When you answer one of those questions with "Yes" you will have to use global replication.
For detailed information please have a look at the replication guide.