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Upgrading from 3.0+

6/19/2007 4:18:38 PM

stanleyfinch

9 posts

Upgrading from 3.0+

One hundred years ago, I became an OEM for Foxfire 3.0+, and distributed around 50 installations. My users were only able to run fixfire via my app (a flight operations management package) - they could not start and run foxfire without going thru my app.

I'm planning to offer an upgrade to 8, and it's important that my users upgrade simply by running a setup.exe that we will put together. So, my question is:

What files will I need to copy into the existing 3.0+ installation?

After the installer copies the necessary files, what will the installer have to call to perform the upgrade?

Regards, Stanley Finch

Essential Air Group, Inc.

6/19/2007 7:14:34 PM

4 posts

Re: Upgrading from 3.0+

I spoke with Stanley eariler. To repeat what I believe is needed (and which many other developers will need too) - a way to:

1. Remove the "Upgrade from previous version" option from the Tools menu so it's not even visible (I don't see a permission to disable this. Perhaps an oversight?)

2. Provide a way to launch the upgrader from either the installation routine or by making a call inside an FFCONFIG hook. (Is there a way to do this and pass paramaters such as where the source FFPREFER table is)?

Stanley, the way the upgrader works now: when you launch it from the FF v8+ tools menu, you browse to the folder that contains the FFPREFER.DBF table in the older "source" app. When you click run, it copies all of the meta data from the Foxfire! system tables of the source app into corresponding files in the new v8+ folders, reformatting or adding anything that's needed. And it will recognize and update any FF version from 2.5 and later.

So I don't think you need to copy anything into your 3.0+ folders. They are read only.

6/20/2007 9:28:04 AM

AndrewM

145 posts

www.aksel.com

Re: Upgrading from 3.0+

Chick,

Developers who will not be distributing the Administrator piece will NOT see the upgrade option. There is also already an existing auto-upgrader that will work that has been built for other customers.

6/20/2007 10:53:34 AM

AndrewM

145 posts

www.aksel.com

Re: Upgrading from 3.0+

Stanley,

The Upgrade utility in the developer/admin version of Foxfire! is primarily for you to get everything prepared and set for 8.0 as there are some features that you might want to take advantage of. However, if you want to simply upgrade and have them use the existing configurations, there is an auto-upgrade utility that you can include into your "upgrade" setup. This routine would copy over the necessary files into the existing directory and would then run an upgrade.

If your goal however, was simply to copy the files ontop of an existing install, you may want to test this approach first but you should be able to copy over the FF*.* files from DBFS, all of the IMAGE files, the SYS, EXE and DLL files found in the FF80 folder and then the Foxfire.app, fflib.app files and then when Foxfire! launches, it should automatically upgrade their data dictionary.

Without knowing all of the specifics of your implementation, a few files might also be required depending on how you are using FFCONFIG and the FFPREFER tables.

6/20/2007 3:30:24 PM

stanleyfinch

9 posts

Re: Upgrading from 3.0+

Andrew - many thanks for your reply. Here's what I'd like to do for my existing customers. Their current installations reside in a folder \ff30v, which is a sub-folder of my app's root. With an installer, I'll create an \ff80 folder in my app's root. Then the installed could call ffupg.exe.

To test this approach, I tried running ffupg.exe but receive a messagebox 'Source directory is not accurate'. The only help I could find on ffupg.exe was the "Manual Upgrade", which indicates that it takes 3 parameters. What might I be doing wrong?

Regards, Stanley Finch

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