So you are tasked with a maintenance pack install, or worse yet, a full blown upgrade. You follow the upgrade procedures as best you can understand them. You are at the step where you have run the compare reports, and are waiting for the developers to look over the reports. Sure, they cursed at the fact that you wasted five hours of the print queue and half the trees Johnny Appleseed managed to plant, but the real fact is they have to shift through 1000’s of pages of compare reports that are meaningless due to their size.
What your developers need is a simple Excel list of all objects changed, which ones were custom work, and who the last developer was who touched the object. This last point is crucial. The work can be divided up quickly, if only we knew who last touched the object. This becomes paramount when the system is shared by multiple development teams (as in HRMS and Campus Solutions). Fortunately, it’s possible to write an SQL to give the developers what they need because the majority of App Designer objects have a field called “lastupdoprid” which holds the user who last saved that object in the current environment. The delivered compare reports utilize this field as follows: if the userid is not equal to PPLSOFT, then the object has been updated by a customer site (and the asterisk will be used to indicate the delivered object has been modified).
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