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Designer SL, Knowledge Base, PowerForms Siverlight

Migrating Customizations

It has been a constant pain for SP/PowerForms designers trying to migrate the customizations made in their development environment to their production environment. PowerForms store the customization in a pure XML format, inside the BPC PowerForms Customizationscustom list in the root of each site collection. The reason for the difficulty resides on that URLs and Lists stored inside the […]

August 13, 2017/by Konstantinos

Designer SL, Knowledge Base, PowerForms Siverlight

Right to Left support

Since v.2.5, PowerForms support Right to Left control positioning for the produced form design as well as for the designer itself. For example here is a form customization before changing RLT options: Opening the designer and navigating to the Options section, users can see the Right-To-Left option. Changing this option has the following effect […]

August 13, 2017/by Konstantinos

Designer SL, Knowledge Base, PowerForms Siverlight

Migrating Customizations

August 13, 2017/by Konstantinos

Designer SL, Knowledge Base, PowerForms Siverlight

Right to Left support

August 13, 2017/by Konstantinos

Migrating Customizations

It has been a constant pain for SP/PowerForms designers trying to migrate the customizations made in their development environment to their production environment.

PowerForms store the customization in a pure XML format, inside the BPC PowerForms Customizationscustom list in the root of each site collection.

The reason for the difficulty resides on that URLs and Lists stored inside the XML must be changed to point to the corresponding production lists and although changing urls should be easy, replacing list GUIDs is a time consuming task.

For that reason, a new Migration wizard has been introduced which helps users produce the XML customization text for their migrating forms.

The wizard replaces the List GUIDs for Lookup controls as well as List Queries automatically, by searching for lists (using the same list name) in the production environment.

IMPORTANT : The wizard will work for Lists in Lookup Controls and List Queries. Any other url or list used either in Web Services, SQL Queries or inside script must be changed by editing the XML itself. A simple search-and-replace would do the job.

To use the migration wizard, open the designer and press the appropriate migration wizard button on the toolbar:

This will open a new form that will display all lists identified inside the form customization :

In order to identify the list ids in the production environment, users must change the URL of each entry in the datagrid.

The wizard will try to find a list with the same Title in the target site and fill the ID in the New Listcolumn

As soon as you have completed the required changes, just press the OK button to receive the XML text for the new configuration.

Next in the target list, open the designer and import the final customization text using the “Import Customization” button from the toolbar.

IMPORTANT : In order for this to work, the workstation must have access to both servers (Development/Staging and Production). If this is not feasible, another option may be used :

An option is availble in the Migration form that allows users to export the XML using the List Names and View Names instead of the IDs. To do that, just select this option an press OK.

You will get a version of the XML customization. At this point you have 2 options :

1. You can use the xml customization to directly import it in the target form

2. You can use a win 32 application (available after request from our support team) that can be executed from a workstation that has direct access to the target server. The migration tool will convert list names to the corresponding IDs this not allowing our forms to break if any list is renamed.

August 13, 2017/by Konstantinos