How Easy Is Upgrading?

Basically, how easy or how difficult it is to upgrade to Waveset depends on the customizations that you have made. Some customizations are highly backward-compatible. For example, older workflows, forms, and rules tend to work without modification on newer versions of Waveset. Other customizations are more volatile and require additional work to integrate them with new versions of Waveset. For example, you might have to recompile or rewrite integration code that invokes Java classes that are part of the Waveset product.

The most significant effect of customization, however, is that customization changes how you must approach upgrading Waveset. Note that the following discussion uses terminology and concepts described in Terminology and Concepts.

Upgrading Waveset can be relatively simple if you use the product as shipped—that is, if you configure Waveset but do not customize it. If you are unfamiliar with these terms, see Configurations and Customizations. The upgrade process that is part of each version of the Waveset product was originally designed to be run in each environment. The product upgrade process automatically preserves your configuration settings as it updates the Waveset configuration objects and other repository objects to work with the newer version of code. The upgrade process, however, does not know how to update your customizations. In fact, the upgrade process ignores most customizations. The upgrade process does save off the customized version of any file that the upgrade process intends to replace, but this is the most that the upgrade process can do automatically.

If you customize Waveset, as the vast majority of customers do, then you cannot run the standard Waveset product upgrade in each environment. You must maintain and must retest your customizations after you upgrade the Waveset product, and you want to be certain that exactly what you tested goes into each environment. Because Waveset is often customized extensively, those who deploy Waveset have developed sophisticated practices for managing their customizations. For more information, see Source Control and CBE.

If you customize Waveset, the most common approach is to manage your customizations by maintaining a baseline and then to generate and promote an image of your Waveset application into each target environment. See Baseline and Image. You apply the standard Waveset product upgrade process only in your Development environment. You then apply to your application baseline most of the changes that the upgrade makes. See Waveset Product Compared With Waveset Application. However, your upgrade procedure also must include some pieces of the Waveset product upgrade. For example, your upgrade procedure will include some subset of update.xml to update repository objects that are not managed as part of your baseline. Your upgrade procedure might also include database table scripts to update the Waveset repository table definitions.

Because the vast majority of customers do customize Waveset, and because many customize Waveset extensively, this document assumes that you have customizations and that you manage your customizations with this approach.