Distribution System

In place of full installation packages, our new Nintex Distribution System (Nintex Package Manager) provides the ability to distribute smaller packages like DACs, upgrades, and other Nintex software (like Studio + extensions).

The Nintex Package Manager will soon be your go-to solution for all updates across our products, but for now it is only available for Dynamic Advanced Commands (DAC). This will allow you to spread DACs across the system, instead of placing them on each specific client. With all clients connected to the Server, a comparison of all available commands will be made from all the environments and if necessary, the Nintex Package Manager will upload/download new DACs.

The Nintex Package Manager entails high-level configuration, contact the Nintex Support Team for assistance.

In this article:

Nintex Package Manager Server

The Nintex Package Manager (KPM) Server holds all of the available packages per tenant and provides communication with an API. The API will be responsible for getting the available package lists and downloading/uploading packages.

The scheduled workflow used to manage tenants is:

  1. Get the tenants list from the database.

  2. Automatically generate DAC folder structures per each tenant.

  3. Copy the Default DACs folder for each tenant.

    This folder is created by the DAC Server installer and it contains the default DACs that are distributed between clients.

Package Management

Nintex package is a set of files distributed to the client machines. The content of the package might be a dynamic command, extension, or another set of files that are intended to be distributed to the clients.

The central place is a manifest.json file that describes a package. This file may contain a lot of properties that pertain to the respective parts of the product, but for the package management only 3 properties are used:

  1. name - specifies a unique package identifier (required)

  2. version - specifies a SemVer (Semantic Versioning Specification) compatible version of the package (required)

  3. extends - specifies another package that this package depends on (optional)

Run DAC Updater Service

With the newly implemented Distribution System, you can now run an automatic Dynamic Advanced Commands updating service. Once the Distribution System is configured by IT Support, you can enable the DAC Updater Service.

The DAC Updater Service can be enabled from the:

Run updater from the Robot

To run the DAC Updater Service from the Robot: Options → Advanced tab → DAC Updater service

  1. In the Nintex Robot, select Options.

  2. Select the Advanced tab.

  3. Scroll down to the DAC Updater Service and choose from the options listed.

  4. Click OK to save settings.

Run updater from the Studio

To run the DAC Updater Service from the Studio:

  1. In the Nintex Studio, select Tools from the menu bar.

  2. Select Options from the dropdown, and the Options window opens.

  3. Select the Advanced tab.

  4. Scroll down to the DAC Updater Service and choose from the options listed.

  5. Click OK to save settings.