When maintaining multiple instances of one application (for different companies), the value of automating the upgrade proces increases but it also becomes more complexe, especially if there are many different project versions within the project.
With the current possibilities of the Software Factory it is a pain to create an upgrade package of a cumulative upgrade (multiple versions). The only proper way is to create an incremental upgrade script for each version to the next version so the dataconversion is always applied at right state of the model (as was stated here). But to create suchs a package, you need to generate all code for each version one by one and then you can combine all the 020 scripts (because for the other code files you only need the ones of the latest version).
To make this process more simple and to reduce manual steps, an improvement could be that when generating code from version 1.00 to version 1.30, you could mark an 'incremental upgrade' checkbox so that the SF generates multiple (smart) 020 scripts (1.00->1.10, 1.10->1.20 and 1.20->1.30) instead of 1.00->1.30.
Hi Peter,
Allowing a multi-step incremental upgrade is already possible. The only thing that you need to do is archive the individual deployment packages (or at least, the upgrade part) and instruct the deployer on how to execute them.
The Software Factory and the Intelligent Application Manager is upgraded in this fashion - you can upgrade from 2019.1 straight to 2022.2. Under the hood, it executes smart upgrades from 2019.1 to 2019.2 to 2019.2 to 2020.1 etc. all the way to 2022.2.
The same deployment package may then be used to upgrade from various versions. The deployer will automatically detect which smart upgrades need to be executed.
More information about setting up the deployer to allow these incremental upgrades can be found here.
Hi@PeterKeeris ,
Does Anne's answer satisfy your idea?
All the votes have been transferred into this idea.
Hi Anne,
Thank you for your answer. I am aware of how the deployer is able to execute incremental upgrades. The point of this idea was to let the SF generate the incremental upgrade scripts without having to archive the individual deployment packages manually.