Upgrading to Version 8

General Discussion
1

I would welcome any feedback on upgrading to version 8.
I have read the Upgrade guide, and installed V8 on a spare machine for evaluation, but not performed an upgrade on a production machine.
Our first upgrade is on a mission critical application so we need to take care.
We plan to set up V8 on a separate gateway server to facilitate fall back.

Would appreciate any feedback. Is it as simple as upgrading from 7.8 to 7.9? (I suspect not) Are there any recommendations, suggestions, gotchas etc?

Comments appreciated.

2

I just upgraded from version 7.9.10 to 8.0.1 a week ago.
Iā€™m reasonably happy with the new version but there have been a few teething issues.

This is what Iā€™ve encounter so far:

  1. Project Properties
    When you upgrade, some of the project properties are not specified.
    In the designer you need to go to Project Properties -> Project -> General and specify the Default Provider, Default Database, and User Source.

  2. Tag References
    Version 8.0 sometimes cannot find tags if the Tag Provider is not specified.
    E.g. I had tag references such as Packing/Maching1/Speed
    Once I added the tag provider it worked fine: [default]Packing/Maching1/Speed
    I mainly encountered this problem in Tag Events and Charts.

  3. Query and Expression Tags
    For Query and Expression Tags you now specify an Execution Mode. By default, they are all set to ā€˜Event Drivenā€™. This will update the tag if a reference in the query or expression changes. The problem is when you use static text in the query or expression it wont update. You need to change the Execution Mode to ā€˜Fixed Rateā€™

  4. Buttons
    A lot off the button components changed format and after the upgrade didnā€™t look like buttons any more. They just looked like flat text. I had to go through every window and change the Background Color so they looked like buttons again.

  5. Font
    I used ā€˜Dialogā€™ font for a lot of labels, buttons, etc. This font changed size (Not sure about other fonts) and after upgrading didnā€™t fit correctly any more. It showed ā€˜ā€¦ā€™ at the end of a lot of text. I had to go through every window to check and resize many components.

There are also a few issues/bugs that IA are still sorting out and are to be fixed soon. The main ones that trouble me are:

  1. On a page load, components all go red while they are loading.
    http://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/bug-13815-after-ignition-upgrade-to-8-0-windows-are-loaded-with-tags-in-error-state/25017

  2. The Save As dialog isnā€™t pre-populated with the file name.
    http://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/bug-13936-exportexcel-has-no-file-name/25211

  3. There is no separate Publish button. So as soon as you save it is pushed to clients.
    http://forum.inductiveautomation.com/t/publish-mode-and-commit-messages-are-missing/22624

hope this helps.

1 Like
3

I would take a backup of your production system and move it to your spare machine. There have been a few scripting changes, and some property changes that may cause some issues and need some modifications before it will be usable in production. I would either use a mirror of the database as well, or setup a read only user to the existing one so you can still view the data.

4

I think a number of these have been fixed in 8.0.2, which should be in final release shortly.

5

Thanks for the responses
DavidWisely, can you provide an estimate of how long this took?

Thanks

6

Hi jrd,

It took about 3 days to work through all the issues I had. Another main one which I missed with the above list was that some of my tags disappeared and I had to export/import them separately from the old project.

I would suggest waiting for version 8.0.2 which, as Kathy said, should fix a number of the problems I had. I expect it will be out in the next few weeks.

7

I took a slightly different approach. I wanted to see what happened if I restored a gateway backup from a current v7.9.7 gateway to a new v8.0.3 gateway.

Amazingly the restoration process seemed to work just fine. I noticed that it created a new ā€œglobalā€ project to be the container for those items that were shared/global in the v7.9.7 version such as shared libraries and SFCs. It then inherited that project in the other projects requiring those items.

The rendering of most components in v8.0.3 after restoration is much different in the restored rendition. Buttons, tabs, and tables will all require adjustments before being ready for prime time again.

I havenā€™t gotten to the operational part yet.

1 Like
8

RE the Dialog font change: