Changing Attribute type and blowing away data

Dniehaus

I changed the attribute in a business object from "Text" to "Number". When I went to save the BO it ask me do I want to proceed because all data for this attribute will be lost.
My question is: Is there a conversion I can run when I publish the Business Space to Live that will convert all current data to the "New" attribute type without losing what was in that field?

Thanks for all your help.

tford

Instead of changing the type of the attribute, if you need to save the data, you could create a new attribute of the desired type then have a process that moves / converts that values from one attribute to the other using a function.

BenHayat

tford wrote
Instead of changing the type of the attribute, if you need to save the data, you could create a new attribute of the desired type then have a process that moves / converts that values from one attribute to the other using a function.

Exactly right as Mr. Ford suggested it. In
.Net we do the same process, first move the data to another attribute then after after you change your attribute, the third step is to move it into this newly changed attribute.

hpl123

I do the same with a temp attribute to move data around and isn´t a very good solution 🙁.

I have many times thought about a version control solution for attributes where we could create a new version of an attribute and then the new version is something we could define/change as we pleased and then when saving the new attribute version we would get a question if we wanted the data to remain in the attribute and if we chose yes the data would be copied from the "older version" of the attribute to the new version. Maybe something we collectively could ask Awaresoft about at some point if many are interested, I know it would make my life easier many times 😃.

Dniehaus

great ideas! Thanks for the help. I will try using this.