BPM Admin Guide

Upgrade Customizations

This section describes the steps you need to follow to upgrade customizations.

Customizations are the responsibilities of the consultant who applies them. There is no automatic resolving mechanism that safely upgrades BPM without the risk of overwriting customizations or that automatically makes customized BPM components adjust to upgraded BPM components.

However, there are several precautions that you can take when customizing BPM that help to protect the customizations from being overwritten when upgrading.

The following outline the procedures for upgrading customizations, which include:

  • Upgrading custom ETL
  • Upgrading custom universes
  • Upgrading Custom Documents on Standard Universes
  • Upgrading Custom Documents on Custom Universes

Upgrading Custom ETL

Customized ETL is typically create as separate ETL pieces-that is, separate jobs and tasks that are called from the standard ETL. When a new standard ETL is installed, any modifications to it are overwritten, including the places that called the custom ETL. This link to the custom ETL then must be reestablished. The custom ETL itself should have facilities for upgrading to new database schemas of tables, and so on.

Upgrading Custom Universes

Customized universes are typically created in one of two ways:

  • Copied - A copy of a standard universe. In this case, upgrading is not needed except for running refresh structure on the custom universe to update it to fit the present Maconomy database.
  • Linked - A universe linking to a standard universe. In this case, there should be no need for doing modifications to the custom universe.

There are exceptions, namely if deprecated elements have been removed from the standard universe or that universe has undergone substantial changes, as happens on occasion.

Also, the custom universe may have introduced tables, objects, and so on, which are also introduced in the new standard universe. Therefore, it is always a good idea to inspect the link from the custom universe to the standard universe and make sure it is intact.

Upgrade Custom Documents on Standard Universes

Custom documents running on standard universes typically work without any changes.

If the principles for customization have been followed, installing a new standard package does not overwrite custom documents.

However, as standard universes from time to time may undergo some changes or fixes, or because deprecated elements may be removed from universes, it is always recommended to test run custom documents and inspect for any issues.

Upgrade Custom Documents on Custom Universes

If customizations have been performed following the recommended principles, upgrading to a new BPM standard package should not ruin any custom documents or custom universes.

It is always a good idea to inspect custom documents, and especially universes, to ensure that they are still functioning correctly after an upgrade; the Maconomy database could have been changed and made custom universe elements invalid or require a refresh of the structure.