ESS Pages migration to LSF9, Need help..

The ESS/MSS pages are just basically javascript/html. You do not use Design Studio to modifiy them. Hopefully you or your customer has tracked which pages have been customized. If so you just need re-apply your customizations to lsf9.0. Also hopefully you already have the 8.1.0 in a version control system, have put comments in the source code where modifications have occured or both etc...

There is not a massive amount of changes between ESS 8.1 and 9.0 so in quite a few cases comparing 8.1.x files with 9.0 is not that painful.

Thanks Jay, this was useful..
just one more thing, since I have never worked with LSF9 pages, can you please provide any one of the sample code page of ESS developed in asp/html, (e.g Beneficiary, PayCheck, Payment modling) I appreciate your help.

Thanks & Regards,
sushil.makhijani@gmail.com

It is just javascript and html. There is no asp. There is no Design Studio. You will use just a basic text editor.

If you wish to use ASP.NET you would need to re-write the pages. However if the business just wants a few minor changes to some pages it would probably be much easier to just make the changes in the existing files. What does your business want you to do? For instance if the business wants full text search ability for something or some functionality that is quite a bit more complex than an already existing page then definitely you really should do a custom asp page.

If you are doing a custom ASP page there are ways to make Lawson AGS calls from .NET so it is possible and if you want to do a completely new page that might actually be the way to go. AGS calls are used to add or update data in Lawson. I would not us DME calls and instead directly read the database for just pulling in the data. SQL is much more flexible and safe as long as you use it for just reading and not writing the data. Us the AGS calls for updates. You will also need to pay attention to security issues if you are doing your own custom ASP pages.

If you are just going to do minor customizations to the ESS/MSS pages one of the things I have found very helpful, if applicable, to use an iframe to link out to a user editable document. These user editable documents are in a shared folder secured for update to the appropriate business users. For some minor verbiage changes the users can now edit the pages themselves.

For us almost all the ESS/MSS pages the business just wanted minor changes so we customized the base pages. For one or two things we have custom ASP pages however they are just inquiry screens, for example full text search ability etc. We only have one .Net application that does AGS calls and it is just a standalone program that runs nightly to syncronize data between Lawson and another system.

We just did an upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0 so I do know what it takes to re-apply customizations for ESS/MSS.

The files for ESS/MSS should be located on your Lawson web server at

\\YourLawsonDirectory\web\lawson\xhrnet\....

And

\\YourLawsonDirectory\web\lawson\xbnnet\....

 I did a migration of Self Service modifications from version 8 to version 9 Employee and Manager Self Service and there were quite a few differences.  At least with the client I was working with, the modifications they had made need to be made in other files.  Some files that existed in version 8 did not exist in version 9 and you had to determine which location the new modifications were going to take place in.

In some cases, the file structure changed, so calling variables from another Javascript class didn't work because they were no longer included.

Depending the number and difficulty of your changes, it can be a hassle.  Simple things that renaming fields and moving things around in Self Service remained relatively the same.  However, if you're really overhauling some of the functionality, it can be a headache.

If you want to see how the files differ, I use a program called Beyond Compare.  It's pretty useful and color codes all the differences between files and folders.  You can get a 30 day trial on the web and compare your Self Service modifications between environments.  It's the easiest way I've found to be able to determine where your change(s) need to take place.

True, all you need is a good html/javascript text editor. Word of advice. Don't get trigger happy changing stuffs. I have like 50 pages minor to my own page and it was a pain to upgrade. Document your changes inside the file too.