An application patch is a deployable object that you can use to update the objects in a deployed incremental application.
To design an application patch, you must consider the design-time and run-time instances of the application objects and the dependencies between the application objects in order to decide the type of application patch that you want to create. Some application objects might be related to the other objects that you want to update, and other application objects might be affected by the objects that you want to update.
You can use a patch type to choose how to inherit the related objects and determine how much impact you want the patch to have on the deployed application. To manage patch inheritance and object impact, you can use the tools in the Incremental Deployment Wizard to understand the contents of a patch and how the Data Integration Service will apply the contents to the deployed application.
You cannot use an application patch to perform the following tasks:
Update application and mapping deployment properties, such as the application description, the default date time format, or the sort order.
Add web services, SQL data services, or REST web services to the deployed application.
Delete application objects from the deployed application.