How easy is an upgrade to Nakisa 3.0?

This is going to be a short blog, which really tells you how easy it is to do an upgrade to SVSN 3.0. 🙂

I recently did an upgrade of an implementation of STVN2.1 OrgChart to SVSN3.0 OrgChart. I had to say that compared to previous implementations it was very quick and easy. Copying the configuration (essentially what an upgrade is from previous version) is much easier than before because you can paste each configuration into its own unique file, rather than locating a place within the AppResources.xml file like before. Luckily in the future upgrading from 3.0 to another version will be even easier than that.

Once all of the configurations have been identified they can be copied. This is probably the most difficult part of the upgrade because there is no set way to identify them if the previous developer has not put comments into the XML file to specify where they made a change. Generally an experienced developer, with aid of the product blueprint, can identify them reasonably quickly. Once that is done it’s just a matter of copying and pasting each configuration into new files and saving them into the configuration folders in the .delta folder.

The next step is to upgrade the XSL files, which is a bit trickier. Because of the new Flex UI the XSL files for views are split into 2 parts: one for the new flex UI and one for the classic HTML UI. Those familiar with the XSL files will soon get to grips with the new format of the XSL files. The XSL code for the Flex UI is slightly different as I think it’s specifically designed to be read by Flex rather than the browser. To cut a long story short, it basically meant copying the old code twice and changing some of the tags (e.g. <tr> to <TableRow>).

After completing all the copying and pasting it’s time to do a data extract and publish your configuration to runtime. This is the real test… what have you forgotten! In my first upgrade I only forgot one change, which was just a file format change for an image (from 3.0 the images are generally png files).

The whole upgrade process took about 2 days, which considering that the implementation contained a custom orgchart, enhancements to the views, changes to search listing and changes to the details panels really shows how easy it is.

So, what are you all waiting for? Go and get upgraded!