Adjusting customizations when upgrading

When you upgrade the AR System server, adjust your customizations and assign the appropriate overlay type to the objects' granular sections before proceeding with the BMC Remedy application upgrades.

You must adjust your customizations and assign the overlays to preserve the customizations you performed before the upgrade. After the upgrade, the application or server continues to use the overlays instead of the original objects for run-time operations so that your customizations are preserved. For further information about overlays, see Customizing applications using overlays and custom objects in the Remedy AR System documentation.

You must perform this procedure only in the following scenarios:

If you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.1.xx.
If you are upgrading from version 8.1.xx and have not already fixed object granularity level.

You should perform this procedure during an upgrade if you have applied a patch or workaround which caused changes to origin objects. You will need to manually reconcile portions of an overlay that were overwritten and whose origin object was changed.

For more information about overlays for granular sections of an AR System object, see Granular overlaysin BMC Remedy AR System documentation.

You can adjust customization using one of the following method:

- Adjusting customization using the Developer Studio
- Adjusting customizations using the Granularity Analyzer

Adjusting customization using the Developer Studio

Developer Studio provides two options to help you:

Object Granularity Level — Helps you to easily identify the overlay objects and the customizations made to them. Use this utility to identify and adjust your existing (version 8.0 and earlier of BMC Remedy AR System) customizations to adopt the overlay behavior in version 8.1 and later.

Use the Object Granularity Level utility after you upgrade the BMC Remedy AR System server and before you reconcile the existing customizations. After your confirmation, the appropriate overlay type is applied to the granular sections of the selected overlay objects.

Warning

To use this option, you must have the original unmodified origin objects on your server. If you have only run the Best Practice Conversion Utility (BPCU) and have not replaced your origin objects, the Object Granularity Level option will convert all of your granular components to “No Overlay.” This means your changes will not be protected and will be lost in a subsequent upgrade that changes your origin objects.

You can compare overlay objects to origin objects to determine what has changed. If it is detected that there are no changes in a granular component, you are prompted to convert the component to “No Overlay.”

This will cause a problem if an origin object has been customized and is the same as its overlay object, because the overlay will be converted to “No Overlay” and will just expose the origin object. The changes will still be present because they are in the origin object.

However, a subsequent upgrade that replaces the origin object will remove the customizations because they are not captured in the overlay.

For information about fixing existing customizations, see To adjust the object overlay type.

Unmodified Fields in View — Identifies and removes unmodified fields from a view overlay. For a selected form, the Unmodified Fields in View utility lists the unmodified fields that are added to the form's view overlay. You can remove these fields from the overlay of a single view or multiple views where the field is present. The unmodified fields removed from the view overlay inherit the base properties. The fields that are added to the view overlay continue to retain their customizations.

See To fix form view overlays.

Note

The Object Granularity Level option can be run against any object which supports overlay whereas Unmodified Fields in View option can be run against forms only.

Before you begin

Disable the Reconciliation Engine and the Normalization Engine by commenting out the following lines from the armonitor file and restart the AR System server.

#"<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\server64\bin\arrecond.exe" --unicode -i "<...>\ARSystem" -m
#"<...>\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_74\bin\java" -Xmx512m -classpath "<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\plugins\ne;<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\plugins;<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\sdk\bin\arpluginsvr91_build001.jar;...\AtriumCore\cmdb\sdk\bin\arapi91_build001.jar;<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\sdk\bin\arutil91_build001.jar;<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\sdk\bin\log4j-1.2.14.jar;<...>\AtriumCore\cmdb\sdk\bin\cmdbapi91.jar;" com.bmc.arsys.pluginsvr.ARPluginServerMain -x <server-name> -i "<...>\ARSystem"

In the devstudio configuration settings file located at <InstallationDirectory>\ARSystem\DeveloperStudio set the minimum heap size (-Xms) to 1,024.

Note

Adjusting customizations to granular overlays can take a long time causing the Developer Studio to time out. This happens because BMC Remedy AR System server creates missing join form overlays of AST:Attributes that has 76 join forms on top of it. Creating overlays for all the join form fields takes a long time.

Workaround:

Go to the overlay of the base form and modify the overlay of the field that is being used by all the join forms. This forces the BMC Remedy AR System server to restart creating an overlay of all the join forms. In the process, the server creates overlays of only those forms for which overlay does not exist.

To adjust the object overlay type

Perform the following steps after you upgrade the BMC Remedy AR System server.

Open Developer Studio in the Best Practice Customization mode.
For information about changing the development mode, see Changing the development mode in BMC Remedy AR System documentation.
Open the object list and select the overlay object for which you need to fix customizations. You can select multiple objects to analyze.
From the object's context menu, select the Analyze Overlay > Object Granularity Level option.

Analyze Overlay options

A report, similar to the following figure, is displayed in the Analyzer Results tab:

Analyzer Results tab

The Analyzer Results tab provides details about the granular components that are overlaid in each selected object and the overlay type that it maps to for version 8.1 and later of BMC Remedy AR System.

For each overlay object, an entry shows the current and new granular section values:
- Current — Displays the current granularity level for the granular component. For example, the default value you had set the first time.
- New — Displays the analyzed granularity level for the granular component.
  Note
  If the current and new values are the same, then they are not listed in the results.
Select the customization to be set.
From the object's context menu, click the Fix Object Granularity Level option.

Fix Object Granularity Level option

Developer Studio applies the appropriate overlay type to all granular components of the selected object. The status of completion is indicated in the Progress tab.

Progress tab

Any errors or exceptions are reported as Not Completed and logged.
After you complete the process, you can continue with the remaining reconciliation steps.

To fix form view overlays

Open Developer Studio in the Best Practice Customization mode.
For information about changing the development mode, see Changing the development mode in BMC Remedy AR System documentation.
Open the appropriate object list.
Select the form for which the form view customizations need adjustments.
From the form's context menu, select the Analyze Overlay > Unmodified Fields in View option.

Unmodified Fields in View option

All fields that are added to the form's view overlay (single view and multiple view) are listed in the Analyzer Results tab of the form editor.

Analyzer Results tab
Right-click the field, and select one of the following options:
- Fix Fields in Current View — Fixes the selected field for the view to which the field belongs. The current view is the view to which the field belongs.
- Fix All Fields in All Views — Fixes all of the fields listed in the Analyzer Results View for their respective views.
  
  The fields that you remove from the view overlay inherit the base properties.
  
  The following figure shows how the results of the analysis — Unmodified Fields in Overlay — are displayed. The name of the view to which the fields belongs is now part of the message.
  
  Analyzer Results tab

Adjusting customizations using the Granularity Analyzer

Instead of the Developer Studio, you can also use the Granularity Analyzer to adjust the customization. The installation directory for BMC Remedy Developer Studio contains an GranularityAnalyzer.bat file, which allows you to run the Granularity Analyzer from a command line. When the GranularityAnalyzer.bat file is run, you receive a report in CSV format with details of the adjusted customization.

Create a backup copy of the GranularityAnalyzer.bat file in the <ARSystemInstallDir>/DeveloperStudio/GranularityAnalyzer.bat folder.
Run the GranularityAnalyzer.bat using the following command:
GranularityAnalyzer.bat -u <usename> -p <password> -x <servername> -portnum <port> -o <full path to output csv file>
You can also use the options of the Analyzer, see Options for Analyzer from a command line from the BMC Remedy AR System online documentation.