App Connect

Could someone please elaborate what the difference is between a user defined property and a user defined policy? I am trying to call a rest service from within my flow and i want its endpoint to be configureable because we use different endpoints in different environments. That is, we use an endpoint for our acceptance environtment and a different one for our production environment. At first i thought i should use user defined properties for this, but then i came across user defined policies. Which is which and when to use what? could someone shed some light on this for me?

ps. sorry if this is a duplicate post i thought i already posted this question but was unable to find it after i posted it.

User defined properties are just a variable you set at flow/application level. They are part of your application and live inside your application. 

Like any variable they can be boolean, string, ... You can override these vallues at deployment time with some override configuration or at runtime via the webui or by manually overwriting the value on the bar file.

User defined policies are a bit more extensive. Consider them more or less as config files you would read. There are specific ones for jdbc, mq, mqtt, security, ...

They have a specific format and fields that are required. You can access them from your code yourself, but you need to specifically do this, it's not build in.

What you need in this situation is a user defined property. If you set it on the top level of your project you can use that one to overwrite the url via esql. As I said before, you can overwrite this value

 - manually on your bar file, 

 - via the mqsiapplybaroverride command

 - via webui 

 - via ibmint deploy with the --overrides-file param

...