Question

Best Practices - Removing Old Versions of Forms Processes

Forms Business Processes

Updated April 22, 2021

asked on April 22, 2021

Greetings all,

I have a questions regarding how to approach removing old processes.

Whenever I need to modify a form process, I make a copy and append "TEST" to the process' name and make my modifications there. When done modifying, I append "OLD" to the name of the original process and unpublish it. I then remove "TEST" from the copy with the modifications and publish it as the new form.

Once this is done, I would like to remove the OLD process so that I may declutter the names of forms processes available in the "Manage" tab in Forms for example. The issue is that deleting the old form would also delete all the old instances, reports, etc and management would prefer that I be able to hold onto that data.

What is the best practice in this situation? Is it possible to somehow hide unused forms or do y'all have a test vs prod server? If yes, how do you transfer processes between servers?

I have read about the XML exporting feature but my understanding is that this is only for a high level view of the process/diagram and not useful.

Thank you

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replied on April 22, 2021

Just thought I would add another vote on here about setting up a Sandbox (dev/test/staging) environment to build out your changes in and then push them to production. By doing this, you can export your Forms process from production and import it into your sandbox Forms server, make changes, export it and when you import it into production you can overwrite the production process and retain your reporting data.

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replied on April 22, 2021

Hi Fernando-

I definitely recommend setting up a separate DEV or TEST environment. Migrating between environments has gotten to the point of not being too bad. The recent versions of 10.4 will walk you through most of the settings that need to be updated. It's not infallible, but the chances of encountering an error have gotten pretty rare.

It's definitely worth testing out; just download the process XML from the DEV environment and upload it to the PROD environment.

Best of all, you keep your reporting history. You could conceivably even update forms that are in-progress, but I don't trust it that much and make users clear out all the tasks before pushing an update.

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replied on April 22, 2021

If you want to retain old process data, then a better practice would be to maintain a separate test/dev environment. Copy the form there for editing, then use the process promotion tool to import it back to the production environment and update the existing process.

Sometimes with "major" changes I'll change the name of the original and publish a second version, but that is super rare and typically I only do that if the original is so old that we're fine with keeping it around for a short time and eventually deleting it and losing the data.

Either way, I'd definitely stay away from creating an entirely new process every time.

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Best Practices - Removing Old Versions of Forms Processes

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