1. Page configurations in the global context are not wiped when updating the instance. Instead, they’ll be flagged as being behind the “baseline” in the Page Configurations page. You can then use the Page Designer to apply the new baseline changes. The process is described in the tech docs, but I found it fiddly and temperamental, with the Page Designer being a little too keen on overwriting your tailoring. I recommend simply just practising in a dev environment: https://docs.ifs.com/techdocs/24r1/040_tailoring/225_configuration/200_client_configurations/400_rebase_configurations/
2. I’m still trying to work this out myself, and I’d say “it depends”.
   • On one hand, keeping the global context “vanilla” makes it easier to go back and check what the core application looks like.
   • But if you have multiple contexts, because different users need different configurations of the same page, then the global context is useful for putting common configurations. Note that each user can only be assigned one “specific” context.

On a side note, it would be nice with some sort of “ordinal” on configuration context mappings, like there are for report rules etc., so that the application keeps looking for a page configuration until it finds a match in a rule. At the moment, say you map contexts by user group, and put a user in two groups, the application bombs out because it doesn’t know which context to use.

​@AussieAnders Thank you for this, this is extremely helpful!

​@AussieAnders - Does this perhaps mean that the “tip” on the configuration context doc.ifs.com page may cause issues (see below)? 

If I’m interpreting this right, it’s recommending to create separate User Groups for the same person; One for security and one for the context). 

In that regard, if user “Bob” was connected to two groups, will this confuse IFS and error out on a page if Bob belongs to two groups?   Or is it just if those two groups that he belongs to both have context rules associated to the same page?

From doc.ifs.com on Configuration Context:

Tip: User Groups is a practical and convenient way to segment users and contexts. User Groups is also used to segment security but the goals of the two might not intersect. So if the same user groups that are used for segmenting the security model is used to map configuration contexts. Then it is likely that user groups administration becomes hard to overview and maintain. You should consider to create and administrate separate User Groups that is used only for configuration context mappings.