Editing JSPs is
not supported in
Lotus Connections, nor are customers advised to do so. Those who have edited
JSPs anyway will lose their changes when upgrading Connections. For those
customers who have gone ahead and edited the JSPs, they can follow this
document in the hope of saving some of their changes.
The following are guidelines only and provided without guarantee that customer-implemented
customizations will continue to function correctly in a future version
of Lotus Connections, and are implemented at own risk. Note that the below
methods have not been tested.
Let's identify the following terms:
- Version A - the former, pre-upgrade
version (could be 2.0.0)
- Version B - the new, post-upgrade
version (could be 2.0.1)
- Unedited files - the JSPs from
either version, as installed, not customized in any way
- Edited files - the JSPs that
the customer has customized themselves
Steps:
1.
Version
A of connections is installed. The customer wishes to customize
2. Customer
makes a backup copy of the files they wish to customize (
version A,
unedited) (we'll call these files
set1) to somewhere outside
of WAS, where they will not be overridden. Also keep a list of exactly
where these files were in the FS
3. Customer
edits the files to apply their customizations (
version A, edited)
(
set2). These are also backed up to somewhere external as described
in bullet 2
4. Customer
overwrites the files
set1 with
set2
5. Customer
now wishes to upgrade to
Version B. Backups were made earlier, so
simply run the upgrade (it doesn't matter whether it's in-place or re-place,
these steps for re-customizing are the same)
6. The
version B, unedited files (
set3) have now been installed and
replace
set1 and
set2 in WAS (depending on which files were
edited/customized).
7. The
customer needs to
diff set3 with
set1. This allows
them to see if we (IBM) made changes to the files between version A and
version B.
8. For
all files which are the same in
set3 as in
set1, the customer
can overwrite these files in
set3 with the corresponding files from
set2
9. For
all files which are differing, the customer needs to manually recreate
their customizations. They will first need to back up the
version B,
unedited files they wish to change - backup the
set3 files to
overwrite those in
set1
10. Now
they will need to apply the same customizations they did in
set2.
This means manually edit the
set3 files to apply the same customizations
to the
version B, unedited files. We'll now call these
set4
11. Now
back up the
version B, edited files (set4) and overwrite the former
set2 backup files.
That's the only way to do it - the unchanged files can simply be overwritten,
the files we changed need to be recustomized. And every file concerned
needs to be backed up from one version to another. It would be cool to
have a tool to do this - I have thought about it. But I still couldn't
guarantee it would work, as some file changes could be less trivial. Also,
this does not cover the potential of new files we introduce, which would
also need to be customized. But it's a starting point and something many
will find themselves doing manually.