Merge sp1 codebase upgrade - best practice advice

imurphy

I've never upgraded a NAV db and I'd like to know what more experienced people do... in general terms only!

My situation:
I'm looking at a relativly simple upgrade - 5.0 to 5.0sp1. The 5.0 db has lots of modifications, supplied to us through an MS program. We didn't write them but they are essential. There are changes to tables, forms, code units and reports. There isn't an sp1 version of them.
We have also made small changes.

I've been doing some experimenting to see how this could be done. What I've come up with so far is that I could:

1) Use the NDT merge tool and then do a compare between my 5.0 db and the merged 5.0sp1 db to see what might be missing - hopefully nothing.

2) Use the NDT tool to compare my 5.0 db with the 5.0sp1 Cronus, see whats different and manually merge in the changes

3) Use the Nav client to import the 5.0sp1 fob over a copy of my 5.0 db. Then use NDT to compare before and after for things which are missing/different.

Are there other approaches? What do you think tends to work best? I've done some searching on mibuso and there doesn't seem to be a discussion of best practices anywhere.

Ian

FrgBonT

I use;
* Utility official Microsoft to Merge.
* A good screen.
* A sufficient lighting.
* Check patience, patience and more patience.
* Working meticulously.

You need a txt with the objects you want to merge the bd, txt with other objects of the same version of bd want to merge but that standard, and a last txt with items on the version you want to merge.

Then, basically go subject by subject on the agenda of Merge reviewing objects.

What would a bd so simple, xDDD

imurphy

This is what I'm doing at the moment - I wanted to make sure I'm not wasting my time. I made a posting the other day and Slawek posted a comment which mentioned the Navision Developers Toolkit - which I had not come across before. I'm now using it... or at least I'm currently fighting with it.

When you say 'Utility official Microsoft to Merge' are you referring to NDT?

Ian

Kappe

Hi Ian

The text comparison I also use within codebase upgrades.
I can suggest you http://www.mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=497 in combination with a text comparison tool.
For this part I use Beyond compare, but there are a lot of other great tools also available...

When you have splitted the text export files you can compare them object-wise and so you can reduce your workload,
because you can filter out the objects which are still equal.

Hope that helps you a little bit.

Regards
Kappe

FrgBonT

Hello, again, before I forget to mention but Kapp, have already done so, a utility comparison textfiles is essential because it will save you an enormous amount of work, being able to exclude objects that are standard and comment decently code inserted into the changes.

With the utility I mean;

Developer's Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics NAV