Customization Upgrade

Naming for Basic Attributes

The basic attributes are the standard attributes available on any database object and used to support basic operations (for example, transfer ownership, revise, maturity change, and lock). The table below lists the new names of the impacted attributes.

Impacts on Masks

If you customized your masks in an earlier version, they may contain one or more previous basic attribute names. Replace those names by new ones.

Example of Mask in an Earlier Version	Example of Current Mask
ENTITY VPMReference ATTR V_Name;N;N;$ ATTR PLM_ExternalID;Y;N;$ ATTR revision;N;N;$ ATTR V_version;N;N;$	ENTITY VPMReference ATTR V_Name;N;N;$ ATTR PLM_ExternalID;Y;N;$ ATTR majorrevision;N;N;$

Impacts on Business Rules and EKL Scripts

EKL was made upward compatible regarding this modification. You do not need to modify EKL scripts. However, it is recommended that you use the new names to access the basics attribute values.

Type Hierarchy

The type hierarchy was modified to align the server side and client side views that are exploited by the customization tools and the programming APIs. PLMEntity used to be the root type for all VPM applications, whereas BusinessType and RelationType were the root types for all Governance applications.

Hierarchies are unified (thus suppressing the distinction between VPM and Governance applications) by:

• Introducing the inheritance between PLMEntity and BusinessType (this change is upward compatible).
• Making PLMCoreInstance and PLMCoreRepInstance inherit from RelationType instead of PLMEntity (this change is not upward compatible).

Impacts on Business Rules and EKL Scripts

Most of the business rules are insensitive to these changes. Some business rules handle objects that are sub types of PLMCoreInstance or PLMCoreRepInstance. Business rules must manipulate the objects with typed variables to work properly.

Example of Use

Let variable (PLMCoreInstance)
variable = ThisObject

However, if instances are manipulated with variables of PLMEntity type, the variable is NULL now whereas it worked fine in earlier versions.

Example of Invalid Use

Let variable (PLMEntity)
	variable = ThisObject
	/* The variable is NULL if ThisObject was an instance */

If this case occurs in your customization, you can simply replace the declaration of the variable by:

Let variable (DatabaseObjectType)
variable = ThisObject
/* The variable is not NULL if ThisObject was an instance */

Policy

Therefore, you must migrate the content of the policy chooser file (related to policies) to business rules. The file is organized by type of objects and for each type, there is a section that defines the policy to use when creating a new object.

Business Rule

For each type defined in the policy chooser, an equivalent business rule should be created in Data Setup and associated to the type. If several types have the same specification for policy name, a single business rule can be created and linked to the different types.

The equivalent of this section of policy chooser is a business rule like this one : Parameters->SetAttributeString("PolicyName"," CustomPolicy ").

If the policy choice does not depend on the collaborative space (project), which is usually the case, the business rule association in Data Setup must be done at the Corporate node level. If the policy choice depends on the collaborative space, the association must be done at the collaborative space level.

The policy chooser enabled you to associate a policy to objects that had particular attribute values. This is not supported any longer.