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 outlines the procedures for upgrading customizations, which include:
Upgrading Custom ETL
Customized ETL processes are typically implemented as separate jobs and tasks, which are triggered from the standard ETL workflow. When a new version of the standard ETL is installed, any modifications made to it, including the links that call the custom ETL, are overwritten. As a result, the connection to the custom ETL must be reestablished after each update. Additionally, the custom ETL should be designed with upgrade capabilities to accommodate changes in database schemas, table structures, and other dependencies.
Upgrading Custom Universes
Customized universes are typically created in one of two ways:
- Linked (Recommended) - A universe linking to a standard universe. In this case, there should be no need for doing modifications to the custom universe.
- Copied - A copy of a standard universe. In this case, upgrading is not needed except for running a refresh structure on the custom universe to update it to fit the present Maconomy database.
There are exceptions, namely: if deprecated elements have been removed from the standard universe, or if that universe has undergone substantial changes, which 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, making sure the link 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 universesmay undergo some changes or fixes from time to time, or because deprecated elements may be removed from universes, it is always recommended to test run custom documents and monitor it 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 break 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 rendering custom universe elements invalid or require a refresh of the structure).