On 26 Aug 2010, at 17:03, Mike Erickson wrote:
a conversion estimate
Hello Mike
If you've done a lot of work in v11 already then your Active 4D
upgrade won't be too painful. If you haven't then the 4D part of the
equation is probably the bigger unknown.
Your app may be very different from mine - most of the issues I
experienced were to do with running on 4D Client (remote), but for the
record . .
Active 4D code itself converts fine - you won't have to change your
business logic in page scripts and the information you're looking for
is concentrated in the 'Addendum' document under 'may require' / 'will
require' code changes.
However I found that investigating small changes can sink quite some
time unwittingly. The ones that I found significant were -
[1] - running web server on 4D client. There are changes to the
locations of the Active 4D configuration documents. (There is a new
folder - com.aparajita). Since the locations now 'float' with the OS
you need to locate the Active 4D configuration files appropriately
[2] - running web server on 4D client. You need to pass full pathnames
in 4D if you are saving docs to disc because the old concept of the
'structure folder' does not translate to the 4D remote mode in v11 as
it did before. Relative pathnames (4D ones - not Active 4D) now refer
to the database cache folder which is more volatile than the old 4D
Client folder was, so a custom location for your web application
resources may now be useful where you simply passed a document name
(without a full path) to the 4D 'Create Document' function before
[3] - the default charset for the 'Write Blob' command in v5.0 is
UTF-8. I don't now if this was the case in Active 4D 4.0 but Write
Blob now has a 3rd parameter in v5. When I passed iso-8859 in this 3rd
parameter a whole lot of stuff which didn't work immediately on the
upgrade suddenly came right again. You can also use 'set output
charset' if you have encoding problems. (I shoved everything back to
ISO-8859 until I send myself back to school to learn more about
encoding & charsets)
[4] - if you don't call any Active 4D commands from a component you'll
be ok. If you do there are issues.
[5] - the 4D 'Position' and 'Replace String' functions. If you use
these for any kind of string processing in the course of your request
handling, better review the new behavior. The main 'gotchas' are that
low level Ascii characters are ignored now by these functions.
[6] - the Active 4D 'On Request' handler has a parameter change - see
the docs
[7] - the housekeeper call is now in a loop - I don't remember this
being the case in previous versions. If you use the 'out of the box'
shell you won't have to worry about this
[8] -you need to tell Active 4D what callback to use for processing
your requests submitted via 'post' - again, if you use the A4D shell
'out of the box then it's been updated for you
Apart from those issues your script logic should upgrade without any
extra work. i didn't notice any issues at all with the actual page
code - e.g. Active 4D variables, locals, globals, etc. Even legacy
form variable handling works. The addendum document is essential for
distilling the pure changes from v4 to v5.
h.t.h.
Regards
Peter
_______________________________________________
Active4D-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/mailman/listinfo/active4d-dev
Archives: http://mailman.aparajitaworld.com/archive/active4d-dev/
