Migrating from OpenROAD 5.1
Overview
The recommendations in this chapter explain how to migration an OpenROAD 5.1 installation and have two objectives:
• To ensure that your migration is successful the first time
• To minimize time and effort required to migration
Migrating OpenROAD 5.1 to OpenROAD 12.0 is straightforward and inexpensive, provided the migration is properly prepared for and carefully executed. Some code changes might be required to perform the migration.
OpenROAD 12.0 provides transparent Unicode support, enabling applications to handle single-byte, multi-byte, and UTF-8 data with little or no changes to existing code. If you plan to use the OpenROAD 12.0 transparent Unicode feature, then depending upon your application, there may be some minor code changes involved.
IMPORTANT! Before you undertake a migration project to migration a system from OpenROAD 5.1 to OpenROAD 12.0 with the intention of using the UTF8 character set to support Unicode, the following prerequisites must be met:
• Successful completion of a data conversion project to convert existing data stored in a non-Unicode-enabled database into a Unicode-enabled database created with the –i or –n flag. We recommend that you create your database with the –i flag, which is the default if your installation character set is UTF8.
Guidance on how to do this data conversion project is outside the scope of this guide. If you need help converting your data, we recommend that you contact Actian Support Services to assist with the conversion project.
• If you are using Enterprise Access version 2.6 or older as part of an OpenROAD 5.1-based system, you must migration it to Enterprise Access 2.7.
Migrating from OpenROAD 5.1 directly to OpenROAD 12.0 using the proprietary import/export feature is irreversible. To illustrate, consider the following procedure:
1. Export an application from OpenROAD 5.1.
2. Import the application into OpenROAD 12.0.
3. Export the application from OpenROAD 12.0.
4. Import the application back into OpenROAD 5.1.
The application is unintentionally corrupted by this process. For example, all button labels in the application are now missing. Unless a backup of the original exported application from OpenROAD 5.1 was preserved before importing it into OpenROAD 12.0, the changes are irretrievably lost. OpenROAD 5.1 applications can be migrated to OpenROAD 12.0 without corrupting the application using the following procedure:
1. Export an application from OpenROAD 5.1 to XML.
2. Import the application into OpenROAD 12.0 from XML.
3. Export the application from OpenROAD 12.0 to XML.
4. Import the application back into OpenROAD 5.1 from XML.
Note: To preserve the integrity of the application through the export and import process, you must export and import using XML, a feature introduced in OpenROAD 5.1. If you use the original proprietary import/export technique to move an application from OpenROAD 5.1 through OpenROAD 12.0 and then back to OpenROAD 5.1, the application will be corrupted as mentioned in the first procedure. For more information, see “XML Import and Export” in the Workbench User Guide.
This chapter focuses on migrating from OpenROAD 5.1 to OpenROAD 12.0. It also explains at the appropriate times the additional steps necessary if the 4GL applications need to work in a UTF8/Unicode environment.
Last modified date: 06/25/2024