We’ve found ourselve into a situation, that We don’t know if the solution is reachable. I’ll explain myself.
Imagine an installation of NAV 2017, but we don’t have acces to the server, just to the client (no database, no develepment environment…)
We want to transfer all the data from NAV 2017 to Business Central on cloud. In tha NAV 2017 instllation there are just 4 small personalization, that will be developed as extensions for the new version.
Which should be the best way to transfer the data? I’m thinking about rapidStart packages, but I don’t see it clearly… A complete upgrade is not possible, becasue as I’ve said before, we don’t have access to the server…
I am not even going to question what happened and why you only have access to the (Windows?) client. But I can imaging an interesting story that you are not telling us. [emoticon:4191f5ee34e248a29fa0dbe8d975f74a]
Well a one-to-one migration of all data including entries would not be possible with RapidStart. Unless you rewrite the way it works today, which I would NOT RECOMMEND you to do.
If you have access to RapidStart, then maybe you also have access to the Data Import and DATA EXPORT feature? If that is so, then you can export all the data to a .navdata file. Then all you need is a comparable local NAV 2017 installation (can be done with Containers). Add any custom fields to the database and import you .navdata file.
From there you can take it anywhere.
But it comes with a warning. It is not going to be easy and lots could go wrong. The direct path from a local NAV 2017 to upgrade your NAV 2017 to BC on-premise (the traditional way). Then enable the “Intelligent Insight” synchronization, and once everything is in the cloud, then you can shut down you local version.
Like Erik mentioned, you need to identify the additional fields that have been added to your database. Without the development environment you need to look at each table from the various pages.
You mentioned that you have 4 small personalizations, so use that as a guideline to which pages to look in. So if it is something regarding sales, open the customer list go to “About this page” and compare the tablefields to those in a clean database.
Once you have identified all, and addad them to the new installation you should be able to import the navdata file. It will take some trial and error time since you need the structure to be excactly the same as your current database
They have a plugin from on partner installed, with several changes, but they are not using all of them. It would be near to impossible to find all the changes looking into the pages… That would be useful if we will know wich are the exact developments, but not in this case…
Nobody told you that it would be easy… [emoticon:6d505171faa4497c85c5ca27290c555d]
If that option is not possible, then you are back to your original option - using RapidStart, but then it will more be a reimplementation. Not an upgrade…
I thought that rapidStart was discarded from the beginning, because of the protected tables and all that…
I mean that it will be difficult, because may be there will be changes in tables that are not related directly to any page. Is there any way to “download” the schema from the windows client, may be to an XMl file or something like that?
What is the problem when importing the navdata file into another instllation? May be, every time I import the file, I will get a “field error”, so I could add the new fields one by one…
Any way, as you’ve said, nobody told me that it would be easy…
You might be able to do a rapid package with Table “Field”. That would then give you all the fields in the database. I haven’t tried, so don’t know if it is possible. But might be worth a try
What I did a year back was I used the Field Table and exported that in the Customer Database - to an Excel file - Then I did the same in a standard version with same build no. - Then I did a pivot-table of in excel to find the new fields.
With the list of the fields/ and tables I used a NAVdata backup into a local database that I then restored the backup into - with a final tast of INTELLIGENT INSIGHT to a cloud version.
BUT… you don’t get changed tablerelations or anything like that, nor do you get the code that has changed or added.
My original intent was to use rapidstart but I simply gave up on that - it just takes to long time, and adding all tables to rapid start gave several errors because when importing you cant do it i one go (eg. you will get a lot of errors when it comes to Global Dimension 1/2).
NAVdata or access to the code is really the best solution here. - If I once again would be requested to solve a similar issue with no access to code - I would say that I cannot do the task, and the customer has to find someone else to do it.
So basically, what you’ve done is export to an excel the Field table from both versions, and compare it. But you can only get the new fields, not the code related to them…
And reading your last comment, I deduce that you didn’t enjoy too much this task…