Upgrading custom built sinergia without loosing data

[heresandyboy]

Hi Gabo and Sinergia users,

By now I have extensively adapted and changed the functionality of
Sinergia making many changes to the source code. I have just published
a v1.0 for general use by my staff and customers.

I have uploaded a couple of screenshots of some of the changes I have
made, they can be found in this groups Files section.
'heresandyboy-....png'

Now that live data is being actively input into the system I need to
come up with a way to upgrade the system, should I make any further
changes to source, without loosing any data. Im not sure where to
start. I considered editing sinergia.sql (and any others i make
changes to at the time) so that it would not drop the db, rather
update it with the new fields. As far as I can tell most of the
changes i would be making would simply include new headers in the
Cases table and amendments to the stored procedures.

Is there a method in place, or does anyone have any suggestions on the
best way to upgrade sinergia, after making such changes, to ensure no
data is lost in existing dbs.

ps if anyone likes any of my customizations id be happy to share the
source with you. I've done things like Ajax Cascading Drop Down lists
(writes to cases table, they are populated from an XML sheet),
calendar control date picker (writes to cases table), customized
hidden fields that show/hide based on status including the buttons
used to post the page. Automatic emailing of content from the create/
update case form (plus your own custom text) when posted that can be
formated in html or text and sent to multiple email addresses shown on
the form, the Logged by email box pulls the logged in persons email
address from the Sinergia_aspnetdb, hows that for starters?

[John Gwinner]

I would like to know the best practice for isolating changes too.

 

What I've done, is to make a copy of the website.  When (if) updates come, I'll put those in a new directory, to see what updated, then manually apply the same updates to my modified source.

 

I'd be very interested in your modifications.  Isn't open source great?

 

I struggled with the install due to different SQLServer names, but got past that, and am just now looking at how to customize it.

 

I also wanted to look at making a way that different customers can look at their companie's cases without seeing any other company.  Ideally, when they create a user, I could have a lookup table that looks at their email domain, and automaticaly assigns the company. 

 

We're runing a ticketing system for constulants during an ERP implementation, so this would be critical for us, but I realize it'll be a modification.

 

I'd also like to see a .Net extention that allows you to login via your doman user name / password.  Has anyone done this?

 

== John ==

[gabouy]

andyboy, what do you think about adding your changes to the source code base, and maybe release a new version?

Regarding sql db changes, and maintaining data on existing installations is a very tricky one. The sql db was design to keep changes at a minimum, by using xml with extensible fields. Database fronzen spots use tables, and fields, hot spots likely to change use xml.

Anyway, changes happen, and they do, it's usefull to have one sqldiff application that creates updates scripts automatically to bridge the gap between two versions database live versions. There are some products out there that do this.

Regarding integrated authentication,could be one feature to incorporate in the following version if we gather enough source/motivation to build one.

regards,
gabo

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http://blog.gabouy.com