Upgrade a Form Space

   Journey Manager (JM) The transaction engine for the platform. |   System Manager / DevOps |  All versions This feature is related to all versions.

Every time you upgrade a Manager server, you should also upgrade form spaces hosted on that server instance, so each form space you have configured in your environment will have a version number which matches the version of Manager you have upgraded to.

While the form spaces may continue to work without the upgrade, important security updates and new features may not be available to them. This can have detrimental effect on your application performance as well security scans, which might find raise issues because the form space mark-up has not been merged with the new mark-up of the latest product.

The most important thing when upgrading a form space is that you want to replace the old form space with a new one and maintain the existing forms and user relationships within Manager, so the forms continue to render and work as expected. To achieve this, you should follow several simple recommendations listed below:

• The form space WAR file name has not been changed
• The form space context has not been changed
• The form space name is the same. This is set in a Manager installer when creating default form spaces or directly in the db-config1.xml file of a portal element, for example, a portal name is testPortal, if you are manually building a form space.
• Replace the form space in the deployment directory. On a single node system, you can deploy the war file through the Manager dashboard.
• Merge styles and mark-up changes

Depending on the content hosted by form spaces, the upgrade process can be one of the following:

Content Only Spaces

The Manager installer automatically upgrades the default form spaces, such as Workspaces (tm-workspaces.war), Web Plug-in and so on, but you have to rebuild any other form spaces manually.

For an environment that has content only form spaces, which are not custom Java spaces, this is a relatively simple process. A content only form space contains the base page mark-up, which is used in Manager by the page and resource merging facilities. If the WAR file is not rebuilt to represent the Manager version you are upgrading to, then you will not see any changes to the mark-up that have been made as part of the product upgrade. These may include new features and bug fixes or security patches.

The custom form spaces with content only spaces are upgraded simply by running the Manager installer used in the server upgrade. You can use a menu selection to provide the name of the form space and its context path as input.

Custom Java Spaces

Custom Java Spaces are more complex and the form spaces need to be manually prepared and the code level customization need to be merged into a clean Java Space for the version of Manager you are upgrading to. This can be a complex and time consuming activity, so we recommend you involve a form space developer tor help you re-build the form space.

Styles and Mark-up

Merging form and pages styles and mark-up is an important step which you may need to do to upgrade your form space. However, tt can be time consuming, especially if the styles or mark-up have been significantly changed from the standard product's set. Depending on where the styles and mark-ups are, you have the following options:

• If the form space WAR file includes all the styled pages, then you can use the Restore Base Content button located on both the View Form Space Resources and View Form Space Pages tabs of Manager.
  Note

  This will replace all styles cached in the Manager database.

• If the styles is in Manager then you have to merge in the pages and resources manually within the Manager console.

You usually need a developer if the original form space was customized. When the form space assets ZIP file is imported, it can bring with it some legacy code that ignores or misuses feature and security upgrades. Resolving this requires a manual review, so you need to do the following:

1. View form space resources.
2. Take note of the Base Content Date, Last Modified, and Merged columns. The Last Modified column will be populated in a red font if that resource has been changed. Comparing the Base Content Date and date in Last Modified can give a clue to the age of the modified content.
3. Click View Content Diff to Base Resource to open a new tab displaying the base resource next to the modified resource. Differences between the files are highlighted in various colors to make changes, additions, and deletions apparent.
4. Review all changes, and evaluate for functional impact. If a change only modifies a color, or font, or ordering or placement of screen elements, it may not impact security or new features and can be left in. Base content changes that introduce a new feature, or patch a bug, need to be examined and incorporated into the resource.
5. Use an editor suitable for the type of resource to make changes, and load the updated resource file into Manager. Depending on the file type, you can use the built-in text editor, or re-upload the file.
6. Test the updated resources, then click Mark Content Merged when the resource edits and tests are complete.
7. View form space pages and perform the same actions as for form space resources. The pages list only the page definitions of the form space. Pages differ from HTML stored as a resource. Pages can be navigated to as they are referenced as links, buttons, or tabs, in the form space and generally have a Java object backing them. Pages can be altered from base content and therefore need to be reviewed during an upgrade just like resources.

Next, learn how to a configure form space email template.