Re: Upgrade V6 to V7 (HP 9000); Forms 3 to 4; Reports 1.1 to 2.0

See comments after BILLA> below:

In article <3ndio6$oci_at_maverick.tad.eds.com>, Bethan Roberts <bethan.roberts_at_nl.eds.com> wrote:

> We are investigating the possibility of taking an existing system
> based upon V6 (AIX 3.1) and Forms V3.0 and SQL*Reportwriter V1.1
> as a starting point and upgrading it to V7.1, Forms 4.0 and Reports 2.0
>
> The big question facing us is would it be more sensible to re-write
> the application using CASE 5.1 generation given that:
>
> (a) we don't own the existing system; we'd have to buy it,
> (b) we'd probably have to modify some of the old forms and reports,
> (c) we don't know much about the forms & reports in a technical
> sense

BILLA> Sounds like it would be much less effort and expense to migrate the existing DB and applications. The only thing that would indicated otherwise is it is a large and very complex data model and you plan on implementing a lot of foreign key constraints and triggers to implement business rule constraints on data. In this case the CASE tool will make sure you dont forget any important relationships and will help document what you have done.

>
> Could anyone advise on the ins and outs of:
>
> (a) migrating to V7 (HP/UX) from V6

BILLA> Migration should be done using import/export rather than Oracle's migration utility. If the database structure is not changing, this is a piece of cake. It you intend to take advantage of the V7 features for integrity constraints and triggers, then you will have a lot of work to do after migration to add these to the database.

> (b) migrating V3 forms to V4

BILLA> We had pretty good luck with the conversion tool from 3.0 to 4.0, but every form had to be visited to "beautify" it because there were many minor layout and font problems.

> (c) migrating V1.1 reports to V2
>
> What are the pitfalls, how much work does it really involve; in your
> experience, does each form and report require modification at a
> manual level; if so, how severely and in what arenas.

The main problem is that once you find you have to open each form, you are going to be tempted to add buttons or other UI elements not possible in earlier versions. The forms can be made much easier to use with very little additional work. As a first pass, we created a standard button palette for navigation and access to custom user exits and pasted them into each form. The next pass will be to customize list of values into option menus or radio buttons depending on the context and try to reduce the confusion by improved layout. It is very easy to get sucked into doing a lot of work improving the forms to take advantage of the new functionality...

>
> Thanks in anticipation

BILLA> you're welcome
Cheers,
Bill Allaway

-- 
_______________________________________________________________
Bill Allaway              allaway_at_corte-madera.geoquest.slb.com
Finder Commercialization                  phone: (415) 927-6203
GeoQuest Data Management                    fax: (415) 927-2109
5725 Paradise Drive #100
Corte Madera, CA 94925
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