An often overlooked aspect of configuration management is time. There are many scenarios where the correct value is dependent on time (or date for that matter). Typical examples are organizational structures (think “re-org”) or anything that is somehow related to legislation (every change in law or regulation becomes active at a certain time).

There are several approaches to deal with this situation:

• Deployment: This is the simplest way and its ease comes with a number of drawbacks. What you basically do is make sure that a deployment happens exactly at the time when the changes should take effect. Obviously this collides with a typical CD (Continuous Deployment) setup. And while it is certainly possible to work around this, the remaining limitations usually make it not worthwhile. As to the latter, what if you need to process something with historical data? A good example is tax calculation, when you need to re-process an invoice that was issued before the new VAT rate got active. Next, how do you perform testing? Again, nothing impossible but  a case of having to find ways around it. And so on…
• Feature toggle: Here the configuration management solution has some kind of scheduler to ensure that at the right point in time the cut-over to the new values is being made. This is conceptually quite similar to the deployment approach, but has the advantage of not colliding with CD. But all the other limitations mentioned above still apply. WxConfig supports this approach.
• Configuration dimension: The key difference here is that time is explicitly modeled into the configuration itself. That means every query not only has the normal input, usually a key or XPath expression, but also a point in time (if left empty just take the current time as default). This gives full flexibility and eliminates the aforementioned limitations. Unfortunately, however, very few people take this into consideration when they start their project. Adding it later is always possible, but of course it comes with an over-proportional effort compared to doing it right from the start. WxConfig will add support for this soon (interestingly no one asked for it so far).

That was just a quick overview, but I hope it provided some insights. Comments are very welcome (as always).