I finally was able to complete a document that highlights the phases, challenges and solutions that we put in place during our migration from Forms 6i to 10g.
I would have hoped to have it before we embarked on the migration but here it is for those that might have to go through the same. Please do place your comments so I can improve it.
In order to follow the migration efforts from 6i to 10g, I quickly put together a dashboard that shows the four states : migration-testing-correction-acceptance for the modules in our application.
On the left side, we can click on the buttons to show the global stats, stats per analysts, stat per application and the modules that are problematic.
The gauge is a Javabean that I put together following an example I found on the OTN network. There are a number of properties that can be set on this javabean. I really did not spend that much time on the graphics part of the gauge but eventually I will have to do it since our application itself might include some versions of this gauge in the future.
There is also a timer (invisible on this canvas) that I borrowed from the Oracle foms 10g demos. The timer is set to 20 min and a custom event trigger is set to query a table that holds the module’s names and their states.
Last week, one of our senior DBAs made a comment regarding our current migration. Essentially, he was referring to Oracle APEX (formerly HTML-DB) and whether we looked at Forms to APEX conversion.
Management decided a while ago that we will be migrating to Oracle Forms 10g given that the in-house expertise is mostly Oracle Forms.
In the course of adapting our reports and submission forms to 10g, some of our users asked for a specific request. In version 6 of our application, users can either request a screen preview or print directly to the local printer.
In 10g, the local feature is lost because the processing is now done in the middle-tier. There are a number of alternatives, each having its own advantages and drawbacks.
Here we are at the end of the second week in the migration of a mission-critical Oracle Forms 6 application. The main points we dealt with are: