Central Variable Management

Frends has a centralized variable storage and management system called Environment Variables, which can be used to securely store usernames, passwords, keys, server addresses and so on.

The aim of the central variable management system is twofold; to enable a secure storage for different variables used commonly in the integration processes and to enable seamless DevOps pipelines by providing differing values depending on the execution environment.

1. To Manage Common Variables

The first use case for the central variable management system is to store commonly used variables from a single central location instead of "hard-coding" them in the actual integration processes.

Consider the following scenario where frends connects to an SQL server and the Frends Task requires a Connection String to establish the connection to the SQL server.

You can either "hard-code" the connection string by simply providing the actual value:

Server=mysql.server.com;Database=MyDataBase;User Id=UserName;Password=Password;

or you can add references to the Environment Variables functionality, where the values will be managed separately for all solutions and processes using said database:

Server={{#env.SQL.Server}};Database={{#env.SQL.Database}};User Id={{#env.SQL.Username}};Password={{#env.SQL.Password}};

This means that now you can update for example the password once and all solutions using these Environment Variable references will be updated automatically to utilize the new password.

2. To Enable DevOps Pipeline Automation

The second use case for the central variable management system is to utilize the functionality of the Environment Variables to set different values dynamically depending on the environment the integration flow is executing in.

This means that you could set the variables so that:

Environment	#env.SQL.Server value
Development	mysqldev.server.com
Test	mysqltest.server.com
Production	mysqlprod.server.com

This way while you are moving the integration process through the development pipeline it can target a different database depending on the environment it's executing in.