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Documentum Upgrade – Understanding Impact of WDK Development

You are here: Home / Documentum / D6.5 / Documentum Upgrade – Understanding Impact of WDK Development

October 12, 2009

It has been TSG’s experience that the biggest effort in most Documentum upgrades is the compatibility of customizations made to Documentum interfaces (Webtop mostly).  While many of our clients choose to develop custom interfaces that migrate easily leveraging HPI or OpenContent, this blog post will only address Webtop customizations.

As detailed in our Planning Guide for Documentum Upgrade to 6.5 we recommend building an inventory all of the customizations made to core Documentum products before beginning the upgrade process.  When Documentum users upgraded from the 5.2.5 platform to 5.3, the smaller WDK customizations were simple to upgrade, but the larger ones were more difficult and time consuming.  With the move to D6 the same is true.  The complication factor depends heavily on what features the customization leveraged and if those features were modified in D6.   Below are typical customizations that should be reviewed prior to upgrading to D6.

Migrating Menu Customizations

In D6 menus are managed in XML configuration files and not in a JSP as in 5.3.  All menu customizations would need to be upgraded for D6.  EMC provides a set of steps to manually transform a JSP file to a properly formed XML by replacing tags from the JSP file with new XML tags. 

Documentum Composer

With D6.5 going forward, AppBuilder is no longer supported for Aspect and privileged BOF.  Documentum Composer is a new Eclipse-based IDE and allows for a well-defined plug-in model and a standard IDE with support for D6 features such as aspects and the Documentum Foundation Services.

Migration of Documentum 5.3 AppBuilder docapp archives can be deployed in the D6 environment with Composer.  Documentum Composer is capable of performing this migration by importing a 5.3 docapp and then exporting it as a Documentum Archive (DAR) which can be deployed with Composer.

composer

 Right Click Menu

The ability to right click menus is new in D6.  However, if there are custom menu options that apply to the files being selected, a new customization to add this menu option to the right click menu should be considered. 

Keyboard Shortcuts

This is also a new feature in D6, like the right click menus, it allows for the option to enhance the customizations to enable keyboard shortcuts to launch custom components.  There is a moderate level of effort required to add keyboard shortcuts to the defaults including an XML definition and a reference in the JSP.  This feature can be disabled entirely from the XML configuration if no keyboard shortcuts are desired.

Streamline View Customizations

The Streamline view is removed from D6 and any customizations to the streamline view will be lost upon upgrading.  The most common place to migrate these customizations is to the right click menu.  If the customizations were more comprehensive, a significant amount of development effort may be required to redesign the changes in the new interface.

Content Transfer Applet Removed

Earlier performance enhancements to UCF content transfer were discussed.  These modifications brings changes to the WDK and the potential for upgrade difficulty with specific types of customizations.  Any customization that leverages the content transfer applet will no longer be supported in D6.  This could potentially be a complex effort to modify such instances to use the UCF file transfer utility instead. 

Datagrid changes and additions

One of the most heavily modified components in D6 is the Datagrid. Enhancements allow for mouse and keyboard selection, right click menus, fixed column headers, and resizable columns.  Upgrading any WDK customizations that contain Datagrids will likely require some rewrite.  There is an option to disable all new Datagrid features from the app.xml, but this is not recommended since this will eliminate many of the improved D6 features.  Almost all of these upgrade efforts are contained at the JSP level and simply require updating tags to refer to the new D6 features.

Global Registry Considerations

Unlike previous versions, D6 requires one repository to be designated as the Global Registry.  This will be the central location use to store common objects used by all repositories such as SBOs, BOCS, and user settings.  If a Global Registry is already implemented, it can be used with a repository upgraded to 6.5.   When performing an upgrade to D6, all TBO and SBO objects need to be evaluated and a strategy to migrate them to the Global Registry defined.

Changes to DQL

There have been several minor changes to the behavior of DQL statements and execution.  It is unlikely that this will cause conflicts in customizations, but to ensure a smooth upgrade, any customized DQL queries in code or configurations should be evaluated.

  • Maximum accepted string lengths is now governed by maximum defined in the underlying rational database
  • The POSITION keyword is no longer supported
  • CHANGE…TYPE can now be used outside custom object types
  • Enhancements to the date literal allow for addition date formats.

If you have any questions or other input, please comment below.

Filed Under: D6.5, Documentum, Tech Tip, Upgrades, Webtop Tagged With: D6, Documentum, Documentum 6.5, Documentum Upgrade, EMC, WDK, Webtop

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. name says

    October 12, 2009 at 1:35 pm

    “There have been several minor changes to the behavior of DQL statements and execution.”

    The fact that DQL updates now triggers TBO logic is a major change and must be taken into consideration.

    Reply
    • bagdern says

      October 21, 2009 at 12:27 pm

      Good point – Thanks for the clarification. We were focusing our list of impacts on things that might require updating vs. an alternative way to execute code based on new capabilities.

      Reply
      • name says

        October 22, 2009 at 4:03 pm

        Well, it’s quite possible that a WDK application would have UPDATE DQL statements in it which in 5.3 were a way to circumvent triggering a TBO for whatever reason.

        Reply
  2. name says

    October 20, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    What is “privileged BOF?”

    Reply
    • George says

      October 21, 2009 at 10:59 am

      Documentum added an a_is_privileged boolean attribute to the dmc_module object in D6, so that controls whether or not the module is privileged.

      Reply
  3. name says

    October 20, 2009 at 12:38 pm

    I am unable to see the author of these articles. Does anyone else have the this problem?

    Reply
    • George says

      October 21, 2009 at 11:00 am

      We don’t post the author names because we want the blog to be a “TSG Blog” rather than a personal blog. Multiple people create and review most of the articles, so a single author isn’t responsible. If you ever have additional questions, feel free to comment on an article or head over to the TSG Website – https://tsgrp.wpengine.com

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Documentum – What’s Next Updated for 2010 « TSG Blog says:
    February 23, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    […] blog.tsgrp.com for many posts including upgrade alternatives, extends versus modifies in 6.5, understanding the impact of WDK development, migration, clone or in-place upgrade, high volume server, common upgrade questions, and upgrading […]

    Reply
  2. Documentum Upgrade – Understanding all the Pieces « TSG Blog says:
    March 2, 2010 at 4:15 pm

    […] we pointed out in a previous post, WDK applications will need to be migrated/rewritten depending on the level of customization and […]

    Reply
  3. Documentum Webtop Customizations – What should you do next? « TSG Blog says:
    January 6, 2011 at 2:45 pm

    […] We published a post back in July in regards how some clients are reducing bad customizations to make their Documentum environments easier to upgrade.   Documentum users should understand that some customizations to interface components of Webtop will not upgrade as illustrated in this post. […]

    Reply

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