My company is upgrading our servers to 8.5.1 as soon as it is released. All of our clients are on 7.x. I am a developer and will upgrade to 8.5.1, but I need to keep a 7.04 designer around as I do not want to update dbs with the new 8.5.1 designer as I understand you can mess up a 7.0 design.
Two questions:
What is the best practice for doing this?
And I have read blog posts here and there that using 8.5.1 designer on a 7.0 db can cause problems; does anyone have any gotchas or lists of do’s and dont’s?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Subject: as for using an 851 designer on a design that will replicate to older clients…
your keeping a 7.x designer around is wise, as that is definitely the safest and best path. While it’s best to have a separate machine, there are techniques that can be found through google search to accomplish this.
When you save a design note with a newer Designer, it is writing out newer structures generally where new features have been added between the releases. We work very hard at ensuring compatibility in older apps running on newer servers, and while we also try very hard to ensure that new designs will do nothing evil in older clients, that path is not guaranteed. At least a majority of occasions, an 8.5 designer would do no harm to an older design note, because older versions are generally good at not reading things they don’t understand. But this could potentially cause issues, and we therefore don’t recommend it.
If no features have been added in an area since the older release (say the saving of script libraries), then that element would be less at risk when using a new designer.
Still, the dual install approach is safest.