Retiring (Deleting) an App Engine Process

It's easier than I suspected it would be to delete an App Engine process from your PeopleSoft environments using App Designer.   But it's not completely intuitive.  The steps to delete an App Engine, as well as what to avoid, are explained in this article.

In App Designer in your development environment, select File > Delete... from the drop-down menu. 

The first part is pretty straightforward.  Specify that you want to delete an App Engine Program definition. Type in the name of the App Engine process, and click the Delete button. If you are sure you want to delete the App Engine process, click the Yes button on the Confirm Delete dialog. 

Here's where it gets a little tricky.  Once you've clicked the Yes button to delete the App Designer definition, a pointer to the deleted App Engine program object will be placed into the Upgrade tab of your project with the Action being set to Delete and the Upgrade box being checked.  And your App Engine process no longer exists in the environment that you are in.

If you exit App Designer without saving your project at this point, it will be a bit difficult to get your App Engine process back, and you won't have an easy way to propagate the delete of the App Engine process to your stage and production environments.  (Note: If you do forget to save the project that contains a pointer to your deleted App Engine, migrate the App Engine back to your development environment from one of your other environments where the App Engine still exists.)

The screen shot below shows a saved project with a pointer to the deleted App Engine process.  

Notice in the screen shot above that there is only one pointer--to the main App Engine process, and not to its Steps and Actions--in the project. That is sufficient to cause the delete of the App Engine and its component parts in other environments to which your project is migrated.

If you're sure that you want to delete the App Engine process in other environments, you can use Tools > Copy Project > To Database... (or your company's project migration tool--we use Phire) to propagate the delete of the App Engine process to other environments.