Upgrade from Forms 3.0 to Oracle Forms 9i

Question

Hi,
I have a requirement to upgrade Forms 3.0 to Oracle Forms 9i. Please suggest the best approach for the migration. It would of great help if you could provide some details on the following:
1. Approach for migration (Whether to convert from 3.0 to 6i first and then from 6i to 9i (or) direct conversion )
2. Common problems that may be encountered during the migration
3. Performance of the migrated application against the original one.
4. Effort that may be involved to convert an application containing around 300 forms.
Thanks in advance for your help!!!
Regards
Sankar

Answer 1

Sankar,
A lot depends on the triggers in the form. If they are Version 2-style triggers, you are basically going to have to reinvent the logic using 9i triggers. I don't think 9i supports Version 2-style triggers at all. (I think 6.0 did and 6i might, but it was deprecated - and removed in 9i as I recall).
This will be a fairly significant effort. I don't know if you're familiar with these early versions of Forms at all, but in Version 2 there was no such thing as PL/SQL so the triggers consisted of a series of steps on each event, and a macro-style language. Each step had a "True" branch and a "False" branch to handle flow when you tested conditions, and so on. So if you want to try to recover the code and create it in PL/SQL triggers, you'll need to have someone who can read it, or try to find the old doc and study up on it.
In addition, later versions of Forms have added many triggering events - including all of the "When-" triggers. Much of the code that occured in a Post-Change trigger in v2 and v3 should now be done in a When-Validate-Item trigger, for example.
So the trigger migration may be your biggest headache. You don't say whether the 9i forms will be run on the web, etc. But to me, laying out the fields on a canvas is the easy part - that you can easily do in a new form rather than trying to migrate. It's the trigger code you need to migrate, and that may be tough if they used V2-style triggers in the 3.0 Forms.
Hope this helps.
Sam