In today’s adventure, I have a complex application I am updating from an older version of our Access Jump Start application template from when we were calling it RDF (Rapid Development Framework).

I am doing this so I will have access to some of the newer features as well as to make sure some troubleshooting I’m going to do for the existing Shutdown routines can be easily used for newer AJS versions.

The first step was to checkout the documentation we had on Loading AJS onto an existing application. It’s in a checklist form.

The instructions are written as though we would load the user forms into the new front end template, but I chose a more difficult path of copying the updated components into the existing Access App I am using.

So here’s what I did:

1. Opened both the new source template and the target app with the left shift key.
2. Copied the new local tables (using the prefix AJS_) into the target app. The old version I was using used the prefix RDF_.
3. Next I copied about 7 new options from the options table into the old options table, deleted the new options table to keep all my other settings intact, and then renamed the old table. I also opened the old table and then used Ctrl-H to do a find and replace on the optName column to replace all the initial RDF_ to AJS_ for the option names.
4. Copied the queries and modules from the source to the target database.
5. Renamed my autoexec macro function that needed to be called.
6. Unreferenced the old library file and referenced the new library file.
7. Updated the compiler constant names with the new AJS_ prefix.
8. Deleted the old modules with the incorrect names after reviewing them for changes and updating the new modules for customizations I had done. The easy way to do this was to copy the source module code over the target module code, export it to my versioning system, and use a diff to compare the two. It was pretty easy to find large areas that were different this way.
9. Used MZ-tools to find all the references to “RDF” in the code of the target app which was using libraries and routines from the template. I replaced the references in just one file at a time and exported the file to my version control system.
10. This was about it. I’m still going through and doing debug compiles and finding some library routines I had modified the function parameters slightly (like sending multiple attachments via an array in my Outlook sending routine vs the original routine which could only add one attachment).

I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I can test it yet, but I’m close. This particular upgrade was much more complicated because of the name and variable changes. That should not be an issue in the future.

This will now give me the benefits of the upgraded features of the latest version of the AJS template. Yay!