Before you upgrade

Before you begin your upgrade, do the following:

• Backup your plugins folder, located in the root folder of your MicroStrategy Web installation.

  This folder will be overwritten in your new installation. To preserve your customizations, you need to copy your existing plugins folder to your new installation, after you have upgraded.

• Learn in-depth what the new version of MicroStrategy Web offers so you can use the out-of-the-box functionality (if it fits your needs) rather than using a previous customization.

  Review What's New to see what changes have been made to MicroStrategy Web between your current installed version and the version you are upgrading to. See if any of your customizations are now supported out-of-the-box. If your customization from the previous release is available as an out-of-the-box feature in the latest version, do no try to upgrade your customization; use the out-of-the-box feature instead.

• Check for any known issues with upgrading customizations to your new version.

• Review and be familiar with best practices for customizations.

  Be aware of how each customization does or does not conform to these best practices. Consider how you can improve your customization practices moving forward. 

• Review each customization you have made. If you have followed best practices, the information for review should be readily available. If you have not followed best practices, now is a good time to do so; it will make our job easier during this upgrade and any future upgrades.
  • Review the purpose of each customization
  • Confirm that all changes are in a plug-in; customizations should not include modified out-of-the-box files.
  • Review what was customized in each file in the plug-in

  • Javascript files

  • .jsp/.ascx files

  • XML files

  • CSS files

  • Java classes

• Confirm that the customization works correctly before the upgrade
  • Review the expected behavior when applying the customization
  • Follow the steps to test whether the customization is working as expected in the current version, before you upgrade. It is important to make sure that the plug-in works before upgrading so that if there are problems after upgrading, you know that it is because of the upgrade.

• Review the APIs that are used in the customization

  The MicroStrategy SDK provides a set of APIs you can use to create your own custom classes and JAR files. These classes are backwards-compatible, so your custom classes should work when you upgrade. You should recompile these classes so that if any of them are deprecated, the code can be updated to use new methods and to avoid possible problems in a future release. With each release, some API entities (such as classes, interfaces, fields, and constructors) are deprecated because the entities are replaced by other entities that perform the tasks.

  Deprecated APIs should be updated because they are eventually deleted. If you continue using deprecated APIs, you run the risk of encountering compilation problems when a given API entity has been deleted. To learn which APIs have been deprecated:

  • Review the API Reference and click Deprecated. This displays a list of all deprecated API entities, together with instructions about the replacement entity and how to use it. You can then inspect your code to work on any deprecated API that you use. 

  • Compile your code using the "-deprecation" flag. The Java compiler finds only those deprecated entities that you use. If you are running the compiler from within an IDE, be sure that the flag for displaying the deprecated API is not set to Ignore.

  Be aware of the following restrictions:

  • Old JARs and JavaScript files may conflict with new MicroStrategy versions and should not be mixed between versions.
    
  • Old CSS files may not produce functional or meaningful HTML output in the context of a newer version of the product.