Set up and deploy WebSphere configurations and applications without custom properties. Examine the deployment to determine where you need to differentiate deployment environments.
Configuration data for a deployed WebSphere instance may need to vary according to the environment where it is deployed. For example, a different database may be used for backing a JDBC resource in each environment. Defining custom properties allows you to customize deployment into each environment.
You define custom properties on the component you create for the deployment. When you generate the template, the custom properties are scanned and tokens are created in the configuration template. The tokens are substituted with values from the environment during deployment.
Property values can be either an explicit value or an XPath expression. You typically use XPath if the value could be confused with another value or part of a value if you used a simple value. For example, specifying 80 (HTTP port) could be confused with another value (9080) and result in an incorrect token. Note that only some XPath functionality is available for this purpose.