Validation of TWX Upgrade process

[SaranKarthick]

Hi Developers,

I'm currently doing inplace migration of TWX platform from 7.2 to 8.3.

I had followed the TWX Upgradation document to successfully complete the inplace migration. In the document it was recommended to do Extension re import for our use case. There were no mention of steps in the document to do this. Our server even with out extension reimport was functioning properly but we got datastore errors (Unable to get search entries: [1,018] Data store unknown error: [Error occurred while accessing the model provider.]]) frequently. So we had decided to do the re import to complete the upgradation process.

We've lot of extensions in our old platform among which TWX Utilities 7.2 is important for our application. Lot of entities are developed based on the templates, things and services from that extension. 

I have found two ways to do this extension re import such as:

1. Delete the older extensions (and its dependencies) and import the latest ones.
2. Take source control of the server. Cleanup the DB. Set it up again. Import the latest extensions and import the Source Control Entities.

I have found the second method to be more feasible than the first one. This is because due to the following reasons:

• To delete the extension we need to delete its dependent extensions and entities as well.
• The downside is I couldn’t capture all the dependencies because there is no default services which would give these details straight away.
• To get the list of dependent entities we have to delete the extensions from the manage extensions page. This will return a status message of the dependent entities. 
• We need to delete the entities one by one and then try deleting the extension once again. It might either give new dependent entities which it could not show earlier(due to message space constrain i think) or it would delete the extension.

So i want to validate if my second method is a recommended one. If there is any other method available which i had missed, please let me know.

Thanks and Regards,

Saran 

[pgrodowski · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I am not aware of any alternatives to the upgrade processes you've described.

I agree with you that your 2nd option is certainly the safer and more flexible one, although it might consume more time as the 1st option.

Especially going through the dependency chain for 2nd, but you can react to any problems along the way and aren't facing all of them at once which is a huge advantage as opposed to 1st.

I would have went with the 2nd option personally.

Regards,

Pascal

[SaranKarthick]

Hi @pgrodowski,

Thanks for your reply.

We're trying out the second method currently but have some issues while doing SourceControl import. I'm not sure if that's due to the upgrade process or our entities. I'll update my findings once i get a clear idea.

Regards,

Saran

[slangley]

Hi @SaranKarthick.

Just wondering if you have an update that you can post here.

Regards.

--Sharon

[SaranKarthick]

Hi @slangley,

We have successfully imported Source Control entities but we did have a blocker.

While importing SC entities the TWX service was trying to import certain entities which were dependent on other things. This was not handled by the Source Control Import service. So we had to separately import the dependent things first and then followed by the child things. We are still testing the upgraded composer.  

Regards,

Saran