Upgrade requirements and benefits

What are the requirements and benefits of application upgrade? To use these upgrade best practices, the IBM® TRIRIGA® Application Platform must be at version 3.5.3 or higher. In addition, this content assumes that the user has a basic level of knowledge on object labels and revisions in IBM TRIRIGA. For more information, see Tracking changes to objects.

Contents

I. Terminology

If you followed the Naming Conventions as outlined in the Application Building for IBM TRIRIGA Application Platform (3.5.1 PDF) user guide for versions before 3.5.2, then your modified objects are prefixed with "cst". Whether you followed the naming conventions or used your own conventions, the following terminology applies to this content.

a. Terminology for TRIRIGA objects

Object Description
"tri" object
  • An as-shipped TRIRIGA object, such as triBuilding or Location.
"cst" object
  • Any as-shipped TRIRIGA objects that you renamed and modified (typically with "cst") to suit your business needs, such as renaming triBuilding to cstBuilding, are not considered in these best practices.
  • Similarly, non-TRIRIGA objects that you created and prefixed with "cst" (or your own custom prefix) are not considered in these best practices since they are not impacted by TRIRIGA application upgrades.

II. Upgrade options

These upgrade best practices apply to as-shipped TRIRIGA objects (or "tri" objects).

You can use these best practices to upgrade from any application version. If you are upgrading from pre-10.5.0, the only object label that represents IBM as-shipped objects is the Root object label. If your TRIRIGA application environment does not contain any "cst" objects, then proceed with these best practices to upgrade your TRIRIGA applications.

However, your application environment might contain a mixture of tri objects and cst objects. In this case, you have the following two options to consider for each of your cst objects. Note that you can decide whether or not to convert your cst objects on a per-object basis. If you convert some or all of your cst objects to tri objects, convert them before any upgrade steps in this content.

a. Two options for your cst objects

Option Description
Object Conversion
  • You can go through a one-time process to convert each cst object to a tri object that contains your modifications. After the conversion, these upgrade best practices will apply to the converted tri objects.
  • To proceed, convert your cst objects to tri objects by following the instructions in the Best Practices for Object Conversion. After the conversion, upgrade your TRIRIGA applications to the version that you want by following the instructions in these upgrade best practices.
No Object Conversion
  • For your cst objects, if you choose not to convert some or all of them at this time, continue to use those cst objects and follow the previous application upgrade process that you used with previous TRIRIGA application versions.
  • For your tri objects, follow the instructions in these upgrade best practices.

III. Benefits of object conversion

Starting in IBM TRIRIGA Application Platform 3.5.3, you can convert your renamed and modified cst objects back to tri objects while preserving your modifications. You can then proceed to modify the tri objects directly to suit your business needs. The benefit of going through this one-time conversion process with each cst object is that you can use the new upgrade best practices and the growing set of labeling and revisioning features. These features are aimed at making application upgrades easier.

For more in-depth information on object conversion, see the Best Practices for Object Conversion.

IV. Benefits of object labels and revisions

The IBM TRIRIGA Application Platform provides a set of object labeling and revisioning tools and capabilities to enable a better approach to application upgrades. This approach is meant to simplify and reduce the time that an application upgrade process consumes, which makes it easier for you to keep up-to-date with application enhancements.

  • You can easily visualize and identify which objects you modified.
  • You can continue to modify your objects to suit your business needs.
  • You no longer need to rename as-shipped TRIRIGA objects when you want to modify them.
  • The overhead of needing to rename an object before you make modifications is eliminated.
  • Revisions of the objects are automatically created when you save or publish them. For instance, when you revise and publish a form, the original form is saved in a revision and is available for reference.
  • Revisions store the history of an object and ensure that any changes to the object are not overwritten by other changes that are applied. When a new TRIRIGA application object migration (OM) is imported, the modified object is saved in a revision.
  • You can easily compare two revisions of an object or two objects with different names.

For more in-depth information on object labels and revisions, see Tracking changes to objects.