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LIGHTLY TECHNICAL OBSERVATIONS ON PEOPLESOFT, SQR, AND RELATED AND UNRELATED TOPICS

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Compare and Report Options

Continuing with our discussion of comparing, reporting and migrating changes within Application Designer, let's take a closer look at the Options dialog.

Report Filter

The Report Filter panel can be one of the more confusing aspects of the whole migration process. There are 24 checkboxes to set or clear. Do you really need to consider each one carefully? Not usually. In fact, if you are going to ignore the reports completely, it doesn't matter at all. But I'll try to describe a few common scenarios.

  • If you want to see how your custom changes conflict with delivered objects, then select the default configuration by clicking the Default button.
  • If you are analyzing a normal custom migration (instead of an update from PeopleSoft), you will want to see all of the custom changes. There is no button for this. Hit the Default button but then check the rest of the boxes in the bottom two rows and the right two columns. The only boxes that will be cleared will be the eight in the upper left corner of the grid.
  • If you are unsure about all this and want the maximum amount of information about all changes, whether delivered or custom, just use the Select All button.
  • If you don't want any reports, use Deselect All.

Compare Options

Now look at the panel under the Compare Options tab. Let's assume for the moment that we are migrating a project containing certain objects. This could be either a delivered project or a custom one. We therefore select the Project option under Compare Type.

The Target Orientation group, as mentioned last week, determines how the Upgrade checkboxes are set (and therefore whether changes will be migrated at all). The PeopleSoft Vanilla option says that whatever changes are delivered by PeopleSoft will just replace any custom changes we made. Unfortunately, that's the default. You will probably want to select Keep Customizations instead. Remember, though, that this simply sets the Upgrade flags. You can always change these flags after running the compare.

At the bottom of the panel is the PeopleCode Report group. This applies if you want to look at the report of PeopleCode changes. (This is generally the only report I bother with.) Here you can decide whether the report should show the entire program or just show a few lines around any differences that are found.

Now go back up to the Comparison group. What's that all about? To understand it, we'll need to shift from our usual customization approach into a more upgrade-centric mode of thinking. Instead of simply migrating our customization, or merging it with delivered changes, suppose we wanted to understand changes delivered by PeopleSoft. This option helps with that.

You can decide whether you want to focus on changes that were delivered (or even made by us as custom changes) since a particular release or a particular date. What you set here determines whether an object will compare as "changed" or "unchanged" since that release or date.

Now, in my opinion, it is rarely necessary to worry about this. We can always see the changes by comparing objects. Then we can determine whether we want to keep them. If we want to know what changes were made in general, we can refer to the Release Notes. Looking back over the years, I can't think of a single case in which I needed to be concerned with this option. But I suppose it could help you with detailed analysis of changes or with tracking down unexpected problems. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what you do here, so just leave it set to the default values.

General Options

The General Options tab includes one setting that is probably often ignored but can be important. If you use the audit functionality to track changes to data, you must decide whether to migrate your audit settings along with record definitions or keep them as they exist within the target database. I'd guess that in most cases, auditing is done within production but not other environments. If this is true, we should select Keep Target Audit Flags.

Comparison Results

The Upgrade Options dialog determines how the Compare and Report proceeds. We next turn to the results under the Upgrade tab. It is important to review these results after any Compare, before the actual Copy (migration) is performed. In fact, you must review them in certain unusual situations in order to get an accurate and complete migration. Next Wednesday we'll look at what the asterisk means, how "delete" results can occur and how to handle them, what "reset Done flags" really means, and related topics.

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