Backwards job compatibility

[garthmac]

I find myself in an awkward situation that I've never been in, but can't get out of for the next 2 weeks:

We are in the process of upgrading to DS 7.5.1a from 7.1. Can I export a job from 7.5.1a and import to 7.1? This is something I would never normally try, but my complex test job ran without any problems, even though some error messages were displayed on screen during the import to 7.1. (I should have made a note of these, but I can post them here later, if need be)

Regards

Garth

[Klaus Schaefer]

Well, backward compatibility normally is never garanteed..... I would not recommend to rely on this.

What you could do is provide a separate "test" environment for 7.1 to check if it works, and then do the final import.

However, I would recommend to upgrade your target server to 7.51A to avoid this kind of issues...

Klaus

[garthmac]

Thanks Klaus,

The problem I have is that the 7.1 production server cannot be upgraded until 2 weeks time, meanwhile our 7.1 dev server is being decomissioned and all code copied to the new 7.5.1a server. Crazy, I know, so if I have to make any emergency job fixes, these have to be created as 7.5.1a jobs, then moved to 7.1 production!!

[kcbland]

What you should do is create a project in production for emergency bug fixes and do them there. You're introducing a chance for more errors and unaccountable issues. Or, re-install 7.1 on the same development server (both can be installed).

Next time you do an upgrade like this, you need to co-install the next version on the same server. This is a new feature that will avoid these problems.

[garthmac]

Thanks for the advice Ken. I didn't know about the co-install on the same server.

[ray.wurlod]

You can try changing the internal version number in the dsx file (from 50 to 36 for example) to correspond to the internal version number in jobs in each version.

Most things will then import, though with warnings (the new functionality will necessarily be discarded). No guarantees, and you may need to recompile.