Backwards compatibility

What’s the rule of thumb on backwards compatibility with things like customizations, RDDs, BAQs, and dashboards?

I’m talking about the ability to import them if exported from an older version. I completely understand they might not work. But if you can import it and then just fix the broken parts that could save you a lot of time.

Also, talking about rev changes like 10.1.xxx -> 10.1.yyy, or 10.x to 10.y
(Where yyy > xxx and y > x)

In 10.2.400, there was a lot of work around Revenue Recognition by Phase. This produced some new tables, fields, and renaming of some fields. I was able to bring in an older BAQ with the old field names and then was able to fix them. Not sure what the behavior was < 10.2 though…

So newer version of the App will “try” to import oledr ones. And older Apps outright balk at imports made from a newer version?

Is it mostly dependent on the ICE revision?

If you want to go from new to old, you can export the BAQ, change the extension to .zip, you can see a text file that has the version number. It starts with a 3. You can change that on the newer one then change the extension back to .BAQ. It will then let you bring it into the older system.

Whether or not it works is dependant on a bunch of factors, but if it’s relatively simple it seems to work a majority of the time.

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The only issue I have seen, and I believe this is more of a cloud thing, is that on some import/exports (particularly Product Configurator), Epicor does a checksum to make sure you’re not trying to add code that wouldn’t be allowed in Multi-Tenant.

< min-rant >Have I mentioned recently that MT should die? And quickly? It’s a big drag on cloud adoption as its limitations sometimes reduce functionality in places it shouldn’t. And it’s a bunch of code that has to be maintained causing extra effort for development to migrate and test. < /mini-rant>

That’s what I’ve been seeing.

99% of the customizations/BAQs can be imported with only minor fixes (oddly, yesterday I had to recreate something that simply would allow anchoring for maximizing). I’ve never had an issue importing a BPM in a newer version.