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Important: Read This Before Upgrading

Before upgrading your copy of SoftSlate Commerce, please review the following details about how to handle any customizations you may have made to the application. If you have followed the Rules while making customizations to your installation of SoftSlate Commerce, in most cases an upgrade will preserve your changes without any manual intervention required. There are some exceptions, however.

[Warning]Warning

Even if you have made your customizations using the techniques described in the Rules, there is still a small chance an upgrade will cause errors, since the files and code are by necessity interdependant to some degree. For this reason we strongly suggest running the upgrade in a test environment and placing some test orders before doing so on a production installation.

  1. Upgrading After Customizing Configuration Files and JSP Templates. 

    Many configuration files, and any custom JSP templates that are outside the default layout directory, are not replaced during the upgrade process. This allows you to preserve the customizations you have made while still leveraging changes to those files you have not customized. Specifically, if your customizations have been limited to the following files and directories, installing an upgrade will not overwrite them.

    [Warning]Warning

    If you have made changes to any other files besides the ones listed here an upgrade will overwrite the modified files and eliminate your changes. In these cases, please consider refactoring your changes into one of the following custom files.

    Files and Directories Not Overwritten with Upgrades

    • /WEB-INF/classes/hibernate.properties (database settings)
    • /WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties (logging settings)
    • /WEB-INF/classes/appSettings.properties (general application settings)
    • /WEB-INF/conf/keys (default location of encryption keys)
    • /WEB-INF/layouts/custom (default location of custom JSP templates)
    • All other directories under /WEB-INF/layouts other than default, which is overwritten.
    • /css/style-custom.css (custom css stylesheet prior to 2.3.1)
    • /css/custom/custom.css (custom css stylesheet for 2.3.1 and after)
    • /WEB-INF/conf/core/tiles-defs-pages.xml (used for Tiles definitions of custom pages)
    • All struts-config-custom.xml files under /WEB-INF/conf (used for custom Struts mappings)
    • All tiles-defs-custom.xml files under /WEB-INF/conf (used for custom Tiles definitions)
    • All queries-custom.hbm.xml files under /WEB-INF/classes/resources (used for custom HQL and SQL queries)
    • All application-custom.properties files under /WEB-INF/classes/resources (used for custom messages)
  2. Upgrading After Customizing SoftSlate Commerce Source Code. 

    The best way to make source code changes to SoftSlate Commerce is to subclass one of the existing classes in the com.softslate.commerce Java package, and place the new class in your own Java package. Then, in the /WEB-INF/classes/appComponents file , you can update the implementing class name for the interface that is affected.

    It is possible, however, to modify the classes that come with SoftSlate Commerce and recompile them to make changes. If you have done this with a class in the com.softslate.commerce Java package, the classes you have modified will be overwritten and replaced with the version of the class from the upgrade. This pertains to both uncompiled source .java files in the /WEB-INF/src directory and compiled .class files in the /WEB-INF/classes directory.

    If this is the case, we suggest you refactor the changes you have made into a subclass as described above. Alternatively you can extract the upgrade and manually merge any changes that have taken place to the class in question, compiling the merged class after you've made the merge.

  3. Upgrading from the Free Edition to the Standard Edition. 

    With one exception, the upgrade process described in the following section applies equally well to upgrades from the Free Edition to the Standard Edition, as it does for upgrades within the two editions. If you are upgrading from the Free Edition to the Standard Edition, the only additional step is to remove the /WEB-INF/lib/softslate.jar file from your installation before or after the upgrade process. The classes in the softslate.jar file will be replaced by .class files in the /WEB-INF/classes directory after the upgrade to the Standard Edition. This structure for the Standard Edition allows you to easily recompile the application from source code if necessary.

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