6.1.4 upgrade, a lemon

[Phantazi]

Hi all, although I read the forums regularly this is my first post, I normally find some poor sole with a similar problem and a kind sole who’s fixed it for them, but.

I recently upgraded to Catalog ver 6.1.4 to benefit from the Nochex integration but that’s where the problems started.

1. No site upgrader started as is always has done. I presumed the upgrade was a light one and didn’t go near any of my subtle changes to templates and scripts. Wrong.
2. I found that changes I had made to my invoice.rpt had disappeared. Logo missing, columns all over the place etc. Just like it was out of the box when I first started with catalog.
3. more importantly though I get the following error when testing a credit card purchase:
Incomplete information submitted. The VendorTxCode field may be missing or you may have used an incorrect encryption password.
I found that OCCPROTXScriptTemplate.pl had been stripped clean of my password and confirmation email address. I’m about to correct this by re-entering my details into the current SITE1/CommonOCC file. Taking them from OCCPROTXScriptTemplate.001 I found in OCCUpgrade/Backup.

Thing is I keep finding things wrong and I’m terrified of missing something important. I would roll back the upgrade and wait for a less buggy version if I thought it was easy, but I’ve had several orders since. I’m not sure how the snapshot import deals with that situation.

I would recommend people don’t use the 6.1.4 upgrade, wait for 6.1.5, and also wait for my hero, NormanRouxel to approve it. Cheers for all your indirect help so far Norm…

If anyone has any ideas on what’s gone wrong with my upgrade I’d appreciate the reassurance.

[NormanRouxel]

I had 2 problems with my 6.1.4 upgrade. I was very cautious and did a clean install of 6.1.4 on spare system. I then copied a 6.1.3 site over the new Site1. When I re-started 6.1.4 the site upgrader totally corrupted several of my templates (e.g. Act_Primary was hopelessly truncated somewhere in the middle). Also none of the Perl scripts got updated and I had to copy them from the Originals folder.

I've not yet tried 6.1.4 on my main system due to these reasons.

My feeling is that Actinic should produce a complete list of every Template and other Site file that changes between upgrade versions and detail what these changes are (they are usually minor - and easily done by hand). In addition any files that get replaced (Perl, etc - usually in Originals) should be mentioned.

After all, if you're able to customise templates, then you're probably able to make the changes by hand.

I'm not sure if the Site grader has an option to list changes without altering anything. I find its interface impenetrable, especially as it's something you run very infrequently.

Finally. I would make sure I had both done Snapshot(s) and had all my Site folders backed-up somewhere else before any upgrade and that I had all the installation info to uninstall / reinstall Actinic. Remember that the info in Housekeeping / Security (for each Site) needs to be manually copied to a textfile and that file added to any Site back-up as this info is in the Registry and not the Site. This way you have both a Snapshot (which is meant to contain everything) and a copy of the Site in case the Snapshot restore fails.



Norman

[cdicken]

1. No site upgrader started as is always has done. I presumed the upgrade was a light one and didn’t go near any of my subtle changes to templates and scripts. Wrong.

There are very few template changes in 6.1.4. The ones that there are, are all listed in the release notes. I quote...

Template changes from 6.1.3 to 6.1.4 - All Themes

Act_VariantCheckBox.html – replaced <blockquote> with single space indentation
Actinic.css – default <form> tag to have zero width margins
Actinicextras.js – function getCookie removed
Actiniccore.js – function getCookie added

2. I found that changes I had made to my invoice.rpt had disappeared. Logo missing, columns all over the place etc. Just like it was out of the box when I first started with catalog.

There must have been a change in the *.rpt file for it to be replaced. You should find your original file backed up in C:\Program Files\Actinic Ecommerce v6\BACKUP.

3. more importantly though I get the following error when testing a credit card purchase:
Incomplete information submitted. The VendorTxCode field may be missing or you may have used an incorrect encryption password.
I found that OCCPROTXScriptTemplate.pl had been stripped clean of my password and confirmation email address. I’m about to correct this by re-entering my details into the current SITE1/CommonOCC file. Taking them from OCCPROTXScriptTemplate.001 I found in OCCUpgrade/Backup.

The Site Upgrader does not upgrade perl scripts - it just replaces them with the latest versions. I agree this is a problem with Protx (due to the hard-coded username/password) and I will report this to the development team.

[Jan]

Reports are always overwritten when you upgrade catalog, I (as a crystal reports developer) don't know of a neat and clean way of 'upgrading' a report, when I change mine I usually just take the new report and put my changes into them again - the other option is to ignore the changes in the new reports and carry on using my own (you have to verify the new database in crystal to avoid odd side effects if you want to do this).

Regards,

[Phantazi]

Thanks for your posts Norman, Chris and Jan. I hadn't realised that important files like these just get overwritten without warning.

It might be worth making this more obvious in the release notes; I did read them before upgrading, honest.

Jan, how do you go about tidying things like the invoice.rpt tables and justifying the total columns etc. I'm not sure I can bear the thought of repeating this mind boggling procedure manually every time we get an upgrade

If it means buying a hand crafted one from you, I might be persuaded. I'm already signed up for your mailing list and use 1 or 2 of your freebie sales reports

[Jan]

My reports tend to be based on the Actinic ones - I do tidy things up where I see them misaligned but they are much the same with my extra bits added in.

To be honest I don't find it that hard to change the reports (but I have been doing it for about 5 years now and know the Actinic reports inside out), you will find that it becomes very easy after a while. There are also short cuts that you can use to line things up - eg select everything on a line and change the properties and they all change at once, or select everything and right click and you can line them up by top, bottom, middle etc.

For a minor version change I would usually just look through the list of changes, if I can't see anything major changed in the reports I would just tick 'verify database on every print' and try using it. For major release changes (or after a few minor versions) I would reapply my changes.

Regards,