Upgrading from OpenROAD 5.1
Overview
The recommendations in this chapter explain how to upgrade an OpenROAD 5.1 installation and have two objectives:
• To ensure that your upgrade is successful the first time
• To minimize time and effort required to upgrade
Upgrading OpenROAD 5.1 to OpenROAD 6.2 is straightforward and inexpensive, provided the upgrade is properly prepared for and carefully executed. Some code changes might be required to perform the upgrade.
OpenROAD 6.2 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 6.2 transparent Unicode feature, then depending upon your application, there may be some minor code changes involved.
Important! Before you undertake a migration project to upgrade a system from OpenROAD 5.1 to OpenROAD 6.2 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 upgrade it to Enterprise Access 2.7.
Upgrading from OpenROAD 5.1 directly to OpenROAD 6.2 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 6.2.
3. Export the application from OpenROAD 6.2.
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 6.2, the changes are irretrievably lost. OpenROAD 5.1 applications can be upgraded to OpenROAD 6.2 without corrupting the application using the following procedure:
1. Export an application from OpenROAD 5.1 to XML.
2. Import the application into OpenROAD 6.2 from XML.
3. Export the application from OpenROAD 6.2 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 6.2 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 upgrading from OpenROAD 5.1 to OpenROAD 6.2. It also explains at the appropriate times the additional steps necessary if the 4GL applications need to work in a UTF8/Unicode environment.