Patent ID: 7730477

Claim:
A method for determining an ordering for propagating changes to an application between a first environment and a second environment, the method comprising steps processed by a processor: determining, based on changes to a first version of the application residing in the first environment, a set of changes to apply to a second version of the application residing in the second environment, wherein determining the set of changes to be made to the second version of the application includes creating a first inventory of unique identifiers associated with each data item accessible to the first version of the application residing in the first environment, creating a second inventory of unique identifiers associated with each data item accessible to the second version of the application residing in the second environment, and comparing the first inventory of unique identifiers to the second inventory of unique identifiers to determine the set of changes; propagating the set of changes to the second version of the application, wherein pre-selected rules indicate which of the set of changes are propagated from the first version of the application to the second version of the application and which of the set of changes should be ignored; receiving the set of changes to be made to the second version of the application residing in the second environment; detecting an instance of an unresolved ordering of the set of changes to be made to the second version of the application, wherein the instance of the unresolved ordering occurs when two or more changes are received by the second version of the application; inquiring a suggested ordering of the application of changes to be made to the second version when an instance of an unresolved ordering is detected, wherein the suggested ordering includes a default ordering determined from traversing a configuration tree stored in a computer readable storage medium; and applying the set of changes to the second version of the application according to the suggested ordering, wherein if the suggested ordering for applying the set of changes is successful, the changes are accepted; otherwise, an alternative suggested ordering is obtained and the set of changes are applied according to the alternative suggested ordering.