OpenWGA 7.1 - Updating to OpenWGA 7.1

OpenWGA 7.1 again comes with the ability to upgrade OpenWGA Content Stores to a new patch level. Patch level 5 allows content stores the following:

• Extension data fields, a special field type internally used by OpenWGA, may now hold binary data. This also enables some of the key features of OpenWGA 7.1 like fulltext-indexing of many file attachment types.
• File derivates are now directly bound to an attachment instead of bound to its file contents. That way two attachments, holding exactly similar file data, may have differing derivates.

The upgrading process however is not started automatically. Instead the administrator should manually start the upgrade process applicable for upgrading. He has the choice of taking an easy path, which is merely performing a global upgrade, a cautious path that may be necessary for special infrastructures, or to avoid upgrading, at least for some time where special circumstances let upgrading your content stores seem a bad idea.

 The following reasons should be considered, to choose if you should take the "cautious" path or do no upgrade at al:

• If you are running an OpenWGA cluster: In order to ensure continuous service of the apps on your cluster you should do things in a special order, which are documented on the cautious path
• If your database server user has no rights to change tables and indexes: Letting OpenWGA upgrade content stores may not work if the database server user by which OpenWGA connects to the database server does not have the necessary rights for the patch operations. The patch tries to add new tables to the content store database, add new columns to existing tables and create new indexes, which may not be allowed operations for this user. Instead of letting OpenWGA do the upgrade you can retrieve the patch code and execute it yourself via any SQL terminal, like described under "Individual content store upgrade". This is also documented on the "cautious path".
• If your content stores are still accessed by OpenWGA servers of a lower version: Content stores of patch level 5 generally keep being readable for older OpenWGA versions, but these versions may also write data in obsolete forms to these databases where these forms are not expected. So we generally do not recommend upgrading to patch level 5 while older OpenWGA servers are still accessing a content store.
• If some content stores are of an even earlier patch level than 4: For upgrades from even earlier content store patch levels you need to also consider the recommendations for those patch levels that are additionally applied. Look them up in the documentation of the OpenWGA version that introduced the patch level.. You can find out about the patches that will be applied simply by clicking button "Upgrade content stores" in admin client on menu "Runtime > Status". There a list of patches to apply is shown which also shows the OpenWGA version that introduced them.