Overview

The standard approach to deploying patches or upgrades to applications in a runtime-only environment is to use the Schema Load utility to load a schema file containing all of the changes to the schema (either a selective or a complete extract of the schema).

However, an alternative approach is possible in cases where only methods or form definitions have been changed. For upgrades of this type, you can directly replace the database files that define the schema of your application.

For details about the system files required when deploying a JADE system and using the jdbutilb batch JADE Database utility markOffline command to mark system file as being offline for a deployed database, see "System Map Files", in Chapter 3 of the JADE Development Environment User’s Guide and Chapter 1 of the JADE Database Administration Guide, respectively.

The database files that define the schema of your application are as follows.

_userscm.dat
_userxrf.dat
_usergui.dat
_userint.dat
_userdev.dat

This list does not include the _rootdef.dat file, which is the default user data file.

To upgrade a runtime-only installation at a site

Ensure that you have a backup copy of the entire database.
Replace the old _userscm.dat, _userxrf.dat, _usergui.dat, _userint.dat, and _userdev.dat files with the new files of the same names.
Run the reset timestamp operation in the JADE Database utility, to reset timestamps. For details, see "Resetting Timestamps", in Chapter 3 of the JADE Database Administration Guide.
Run the JADE application, to verify that the upgrade was successful.

You can upgrade an application in this way if methods or form definitions only have been changed between the previous release and the current release. You cannot upgrade in this way if any changes have been made to the structures of persistent classes, including adding, deleting, or modifying properties, changing dictionary keys, or changing collection memberships. If any of these changes have been made, the database files that define your schema will be incompatible with the runtime data and errors will result when you attempt to access the data.

Class, interface, final method numbers, and property subId numbers must also be identical between the previous and the current releases of the database files that define your schema. For details, see "Restrictions" under "Preserving Runtime Data".