Hi all,

Next month we are moving our systems to a new AS400 and with that we are having to upgrade WebFocus. We are currently on 5.3.4 and will be going all the way to 7.6.5. Information Builders are booked to do the installation, so hopefully everything will be setup as best as possible.

We haven't done a WebFocus upgrade before and so I don't really know quite what to expect? My main concern is that we only have a very short window of time, 2 weeks, to test the new version and to fix any issues.

We are planning to run as many of our reports as possible on both systems and see if there are any differences - if they run at all!?

I have searched the forum and read quite a few posts on Upgrades, but would like to hear peoples thoughts and tips - especially on the coding side. Theoretically should all our code still work on the newer version? Does anyone know of any aspect that definitely won’t work and that we should look out for?

Many thanks

Mark

If you search on 762 there's a blog about an upgrade I did.

You will have to test all your code as backward compatibility is not guaranteed. As IBI are doing the upgrade I would suggest you put all your effort in to making sure you test everything.

Good luck. If you get stuck post us your probs and I'll try and help. On the upside 762 is a lot quicker and there's a lot of new features.

John

I agaree, test test test. You may be 'bit' by code tightening, as it shouldn't have worked in the past, but it did, now it doesn't due to code fixes by IB.

I'll echo John's statement about testing EVERYTHING. I wouldn't assume that similar reports/processes will run the same way. You MIGHT be able to assume that identical reports (except for criteria values, etc) will run the same.

Another thing to be careful of is your process for migrating metadata - will MFD and ACX files remain the same or will they be regenerated in the new environment? Compare any newly created MFDs to the old ones. (We had an issue where sytem-generated field names in parent-child segments CHANGED leaving us in a lurch.)

Good luck

We went from 5.3.3 to 7.6.2 with testing for 7.6.0 and 7.6.1 in between. Most of the serious problems were corrected in 762, but Leah is correct in that there is quite a bit of code tightening.

One of the things that bit our developers was laziness when coding the AYM and AYMD subroutines. You MUST use legacy date formats as documented in the Functions manual. Using a smart date format won't cut it anymore.

The autoprompt screen, if you use it, has changed its look. It also has a number of incarnations so check into that.

Darin is correct about the metadata for relational tables. If you are not into variable alpha formats, i.e. A10V, then I would suggest that you code the following in your edasprof for each type of data source that you have: ENGINE SQLxxx SET VARCHAR OFF. It will save you many problems in the future.

We are getting ready to move to 765 ourselves but we did all the heavy testing for 762.

Good luck!

As Ginny pointed out the varchar was the biggest problem when my previous employer upgraded. It affected our SQL passthrus as well as our WebFocus code.