Re: upgrading forms 4.5

I am busy testing this at the moment.

We are not using any third party tools, just put the following line in a MS-DOS batch file(I assume you using Windows)

for %%F in (*.pll) do ifcmp60 %%F userid=scott/tiger_at_conn module_type =LIBRARY batch=yes upgrade=yes version=45 UPGRADE_PLSQL=yes

This will upgrade all pll files in the same sub-directory. To upgrade mmb and fmb files, simply change the wildcard from *.pll to *.fmb or *.mmb and also the module type.

The issue that could present problems is the RAM of the pc. We found a lot of the illegal errors you sometimes get when Windows runs out memory.

Our apps are split into various areas. An area can have as much as 250 pll files. It takes +/- 20 minutes to go through the PLL's and a little longer for the same amount of FMB's. It depends on the size if the files. I recommend you manually upgrade any file whose fmb exceeds 1meg. We only had 2 of those. You should upgrade shared PLL's first. Just our luck to have our more commonly used PLL's at latter end of the alphabet, and therefore not upgraded first.

I found that there were a few (not more than 20) files that we had to look at individually. On our first test run we found problems with missing attributes in some FMB's. I will be investigating that during this week. I suspect it may have something to do with the subclassing vs copying of visual atttributes.

Also, you may find that where a developer was a little lax, Forms 4.5 was more forgiving. 6i is not. For example some of our developers used a "dummy" LOV which had the record group select call up a column on the database which was type varchar2(80). The width in the LOV was defined as 1. For some reason 4.5 did not return an error when generating the form, but 6i does. This was not an issue when running the form, because the record group was never used. The developer programmatically recreated it and the LOV at run time.

We also ran into a problem where a developer calls a report using the HOST command from an FMB or PLL. The runtime for report pgm was hardcoded as something like 'R30RUN32"(can't remember exactly), but for Reports 6i, the runtime is RWRUN60. These have to be manually changed.

Calling the report runtime from the menu was not a problem. Just do a search and replace.

Your last challenge is to make sure that you are upgrading the correct version, and that you have all the source. If you are part of a large organisation, like I am, then this excerise will tell you how well your source code is being managed. Of course, everyone will bet their mother on this, but........

They will of course blame the source control programs.

Glenn

"Sajit Kalidas" <sajit_at_infowave.co.za> wrote in message news:3c04d25a$0$225_at_hades.is.co.za...
> Hi,
>
> I am about to start upgrading several forms 4.5 systems to forms 6i. I am
> sure that others have gone this route also.
> -Have you experienced any problems along the way?
> -Are there tips/tricks that you have learnt that you are willing to share?
> - Have you used any 3rd party tools to assist you?
> - What was the average time to perform the upgrade?
>
> Any assistance/advice given is much appreciated.
>
> Regards
>
> Sajit
>
>
Received on Mon Dec 03 2001 - 19:46:40 CET