We are completing the process of upgrading our HTML pages from WebFocus 7.6 to WebFocus 8.1.05M, and occasionally run into a page that just won't work properly - the styling will be wrong, controls don't populate, the form submit button doesn't work, etc. Often, there is a simple error in the XML.

We expect to see a big chunk of XML starting with a "rootxmlnode" tag, like this:

<!--//confidential_id=focus_xmlelement
<rootxmlnode focoption="FOC_NONE" nextelementuniquenumber="1">
	<variables>
...
</rootxmlnode>
-->

Often in one of these problem pages, in place of the "rootxmlnode" tag will be a "requests" tag:

<!--//confidential_id=focus_xmlelement
<requests focoption="FOC_NONE" nextelementuniquenumber="1">
	<variables>
...
</requests>
-->

Now, in our version, the "requests" tag is a valid tag, but it is meant to be a child element down inside somewhere. So, I take and fix that one tag, and we're back in business again.

Yes, this is a text editor operation, in our versions best done through the web, rather than in App Studio. Editing using the external editor from App Studio may result in App Studio eating your code and leaving you with nothing, and (in my version) will also result in the report title being cleared under File/Folder properties (this has been reported and confirmed as a bug). Occasional text editing has been indispensable to our conversion process.

Hope this helps someone!

- Rob

Rob,

Thanks for your insight.

You're quite lucky that most of your v7.6. parameter screens work - we had a heck of a time upgrading our older HTML pages.

I also noticed the disappearing report title in App Studio v8.1.05M - too bad it wasn't a one-off glitch.

Francis,

The whole story is longer; sometime I plan to post something longer on what we've learned in the upgrade process. We found that we had best success opening and saving our 7.6 pages in Dev Studio 8 to get them half-way upgraded, and then opening in App Studio and completing the upgrade. Often we had to do a number of additional items to get the page working again, but that process got it to where we could at least work with it in App Studio.

Pages where we had used modern HTML and CSS took extra work too.

A variation on the trick above is that sometimes the XML block will be duplicated. Normally, I delete the first one and leave the second, and that gets us back in business again. If it's possible to do *that* in App Studio, via the GUI, I'd be very impressed!

- Rob

I'm beginning to think we were lucky that we rebuilt all our HTML pages in 8.1.04, as we have not had any issues like this in 8.1.05. 8.2.01 is another issue....

8.2.01 is another issue....

Having just fought my way through the 8.0.07 to 8.1.05M conversion, I was hoping the 8.2x conversion would go smoother. Are folks having trouble making the jump from 8.1.05M to 8.2x? We are heavy in JavaScript/jQuery and I am not looking forward to debugging all that code again.

From what I have seen, there is code tightening.

But our code is quite complex and custom.