dynamicsusers: How to get a good picture on someone else's developments

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Источник: http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/waldo/...velopment.aspx
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My customer had the feeling that his former partner had done some "not-standard" developments in his database, and he wanted to get a clear picture about this. Therefore, he contacted our company to do a 1 day investigation of the custom developments in his database, to get a picture on what is wrong, and what should be done.

Here is a little description on how I do this, which might be useful to y'all.

Some considerations:

• Everyone can change the modified flag. This means that when you filter "modified=yes", you're never sure you got all modified objects.
• Not everyone documents their code. This means you can't rely on documentation either.

This in consideration, I just compare every object to the base version. And guess what ... there is a rather quick way to do that.

First of all you have to determine the base version.
First of all, click Help / About. It could be that the client had an runtime upgrade, so be careful. You should interprete the version that is NOT between brackets (between brackets is the client version). The part that is NOT between brackets should be the database version. Actually, it executes the code of CU1, trigger "ApplicationVersion". Sidenote: this trigger should always be changed when doing a full upgrade! Also, this trigger should ONLY be changed when doing a full upgrade.
You see that only checking the "about" isn't enough.
What I also do is checking the version list of some base objects, like:

• Codeunit 80, 90, 12
• Table 17, 18, 32

The version is usually something like: NAVW14.00. This is a 4.0 (no SP). E.g. NAVW14.00.02 would be a 4.00SP2.
If you got all this info, I think you get a pretty good idea of what version the base version is.

Second, you export EVERY object to text from both the customized version and the base version. After that, you split the files with one of the many split file tools that you can download on the forums. Here is a link: http://www.mibuso.com/dlinfo.asp?FileID=831 .

I use the Arasis Merge to compare my files.
Why? Because it is not only possible to do a three way compare and merge (not interesting for this topic, but very interesting for merge-jobs), but it has also a reporting functionality, where you can create an HTML report based on the changed that it finds between the files of two folders.

When you run the report for your two folders, you get a summery like this:



Doesn't look exciting yet, except for point 2, I think.

BUT, furthermore, there is an HTML summery report where you can drill down till code level what the changes are. So you get a list like this:



The blue lines are the objects that are changed. If you click on such a line, you get a report which summerizes the changes in that file only:



And also a detail like:





It is very easy to drill down from overall level to code level.

This way, it's quite easy to get a picture of:

• All customizations in all objects
• The way it was coded
• The way it was documented
• The kind of functionalities that were created
• The way that "standard NAV methodology" was used (TEST NEAR, TEST FAR, DO IT, CLEAN UP)
• ...

Kind regards,

Eric Wauters


Источник: http://dynamicsuser.net/blogs/waldo/...velopment.aspx