Recently I saw a post in OT Forum that caught my eye https://forums.opentext.com/forums/discussion/comment/935976#Comment_935976 What prompted me to write this is because the OT experts also advised using some other mechanisms (XML WF Extensions and use of WR). Now, normally I like to code as well as any other user in Livelink a.k.a Content Server so why this post is because I remember when OT announced the Item Handler and Item Reference(yes they are different) several years ago I believe when Tammy Jakubowski(now GCI) was the WF Product Manager at OpenText.It was downright confusing but did it work in complicated situation boy it did. So I also asked the same questions why would you need WF Attributes and Form attributes in the workflow because they both do the same thing. But this user kept telling me that Business Workspaces apparently has a WF Step that creates BWS’s and it would only work with WF Attributes and they didn’t want their users to see the WF Interface
I replied with a simple OOB implementation where I used a simple throwaway hardcoded documents inside my WF Attachments map and using two Item Handlers Copied what a user entered in a Form Value to a Category to the throwaway Object and using a second step copied that Category Values onto a WF Attribute.
Recently I was tasked with upgrading our systems from its initial version to two times jump so 971 to 10.5.I will chronicle my experiences here. Perhaps provide a structure.I also want to quell some myths about the whole process just to make sure you can do this logically and correctly.
First create a draft plan,in my draft plan I included this.I would need at least one VM that can house or Production 971 Binaries,a clone of the database and a clone of the EFS.If one had been storing items in perhaps Archive Server one should have a playing copy of that also. An OTAS based livelink upgrade can pose its challenges if not done correctly but it is no different than a EFS if you do it wrong you can write test data into your productive store 🙂 This involves talking to other people like DBA’s and Storage folks as a heavily used LL system can have tons and tons of data.You will most likely encounter the after effects of long time use,different administrators and their styles etc.So after a few failed attempts I understood why OT says a DB5 verification is very important.The Verification basically runs single threaded and will try to pinpoint anomalies in the database.Most likely it will pinpoint content loss such as bulk imports etc without actual version files et al .In my case the database had wrong pointers,duplicate dataid’s (wow),removed KUAf Id’s(somebody had fun with a oracle tool).So after going back and forth between OT and us I just thought like this and created a program(oscript) to check important structures.I list 3,your mileage will vary but essentially I grabbed all categories ,form templates and wf map structures.None of these checks happen in DB5 it just looks for existence.In hilarious cases I uncovered a category data structure mysteriously would turn up as a drawing PDF.One could argue that the users would have noticed, so this was an old category that nobody noticed.You don’t have to do this but each of those anomalies would prevent a upgrade and it is back and forth with OT support so I did it just to get some time advantage.
The second thing was I had to get all the optional modules and our system is no different from any other system a lot of optional modules some inserting schema some not.
The third thing was our systems were customized with Oscript to provide enhanced user experience as well as awesome home written modules that takes the tedium of long running things like category upgrades,permission pushes et al a very intelligent add on to the OI module that people can use generically to upload their data like that.So our team sat down and thought of what we could retire and what we should re-code,refactor so many of them were thrown out .Many useful ones we kept.We particularly liked the Distributed Agent framework,ours is very similar to that but if time comes and there is an appetite we would code it for that.
About the re-coding effort here’s the clunker,we were to use CSIDE .Naturally all of my team are hard core Builder aficionados and boy that was a journey.I probably think we were the first org to do something with CSIDE so naturally I gave them a lot of screenshots and dumps and OT dev was very receptive.In extremely tight time constraints we developed parallel modules in 97 1 and 10 and just just sucked them up for our SRC code maintaining thing called TFS. We also learned how to work parallel on oscript but not being a code churning house our code is not that complicated so if I was working on a module somebody else was working on another as well.
So the environment prepared was
971 VM with the same Oracle client and the same DB type of clone.
I removed Prod EFS and Prod Admin server info from clone.
We decided to rebuild search index as nobody had any clue whether it was good and it was eons before new search technology.
A base install of LL was done and the working 971 binary copy from prod was put as an overlay.Now many starting out people do not know this technique where you can get a copy of your prod binary replete with patches et al into a playing system.BTW this is what you hear as the “Parallel Upgrade” approach .Its database connection was redefined .In very olden times when there was no differentiation between 32 and 62 bits and VM’s were not popular and cheap, it was possible to use the existing boxes and run the upgrade.This was the “Update an Instance” method.This is largely vestigial at this time and very error prone not to say you would have a real hard time going back to the working version 🙂
All old 971 custom modules were removed so this database had only knowledge of OT software core and optional.
Did my health check I said earlier like look at cats,form templates and wf maps,removed any that would hamper a upgrade.
At this point one can take this to a CS10.5 binary and start the upgrade.That is my next article.
BTW- I am not a novice when it comes to Upgrades I started using livelink software in 1999 and has worked in version 8.1.5 so I pretty much know the heartbeat of an upgrade and gets pleasure in challenges and how one methodically removes the challenges.Do not try an upgrade if you have not dry run the procedure without fail a couple of times.In most cases the upgrade can be done timely the planning can take weeks,if not months.
Forms as the name implies is a object where you can capture input and store them in livelink . The exact methods are only going to serve as what you design your forms to be.I wrote this because a user was asking about this in the KB
Main Attributes: Forms can be made to work only by installing the “Forms Module”,which in turn will give you a Form Template sub type(230). This serves as the straw man for your data requirements.
Installation of WEB FORMS will give you HTML form capability like wise if you install PDF Forms it will give you that capability.
Forms is used extensively in delivering a awesome user experience,however the form template code is very busy and in efficient as it will add unwanted(literally thousands of lines of javascript ) so anything you can do to optimize javascript you can do that. In the course of your work you will create a Form Template,create HTML Views so that user experience can be controlled via javascript logic,thousands and thousands of examples full forms etc in the KB.
Almost all organizations will need data in forms to be reported so use SQL as storage.If you keep it at default it could go as version files which is not parsable by a SQL tool nor will it have header info(you won’t know which field is which). Users using the Transmittal product usually get bitten by the fact that most of the work in transmittals revolve around forms and if you don’t make it SQL storage you will never be able to report on it.Actually on my first project installing transmittals I bungled and then I looked under the covers to understand it.Even now there is no mention in any guide saying change forms to SQL storage.A recent help to a
You can very greatly experience a users’ livelink workflow experience by chnaging the process to use FORMS while maintaining the business logic of the workflow
Advanced Topics in Forms/Workflows
This I put here and only if you know Oscript is this of any use
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