Easy upgrading/merging of NAV developments

Miklos_Hollender

I think many of you know this, but maybe somebody does not, so:

If you open two Navision databases (one local, one server f.e. you cannot open two local ones without installing a second client), then copy-paste works very sophisticatedly: copy-pasting a button, menu item, or a function in the View/Locals/Functiobs carries the local variables, the code, and also copy-pasting a table fields carries the locals and the code.

Therefore, to make your developments easy to merged into upgraded databases, you just write a short document listing all the new objects to be imported into the new version, and a very simple guide for modified objects such as:

-T36: copy-paste fields 50012-50014
- F42: create tab Blahblah and copy-paste all the fields and buttons on that tab

and then upgrading will be very easy.

A typical upgrade process would be somethink like this:

- take a local FDB of the standard version of the new version
- import the new objects, copy-paste the changes of the standard objects by the guide you written, test it
- make a backup of the old database and stop the server of course
- import ALL objects of this local database
- run Upgrade Toolkit to upgrade the data. Well, this is where you can have problems. Basically the upgrade toolkits are for the case when the database structure changes in the new version, like there are new fields, and these toolkits change your data to fit the new fields/tables. Maybe the toolkit does not fit perfectly to those changes you made to fields/tables, to this is the only point that can be hard - test it, look at the code, change it to reflect your changes to tables/fields etc. Or just look at what the toolkit does, and copy and run that part of it that's relevant to the functionality you are using.