Hard-coded paths

[Robert Milfajt]

After just completing a successful upgrade from 3.8.1P to 5.5rev1, I have a question which may have been addressed in practice.

During an upgrade, one of the steps is to check all your code for references to the old paths, in my case, /hci -> /qvdx, root3.8.1P -> qdx5.5/integrator, etc.  This was the same back in the day when I was at a diffeent site that upgraded for 3.3.1P->3.5.4P.

Has anyone addressed this so that during an upgrade you do not need to worry about these types of “goofy” changes?  I am particulary curious what the Unix users have done, since symbolic links seem to be a natural way to fix this.

Thanks,

Bob

Robert Milfajt
Northwestern Medicine
Chicago, IL

Topic

[Max Drown (Infor)]

Very good question. I’d like to know as well.

-- Max Drown (Infor)

[Robert Kersemakers]

We have Cloverleaf on HP-UX and I really like to use symbolic links for this problem.

When we started with CL3.7.1,  $HCIROOT was /hci/cloverleaf3.7.1 in which all sites resided. Our main site was called ‘orbis’. We created a symbolic link /cldata, which refered to /hci/cloverleaf3.7.1/orbis. In our Netconfig, all paths concerning the orbis-site start with /cldata.

Later we migrated to CL5.2 with $HCIROOT /hci/qdx5.2/integrator. All we had to do is make sure all subdirectories of our orbis site were in place and then recreate the /cldata symbolic link so it referred to /hci/qdx5.2/integrator/orbis.

This way we don’t need to change all paths in our Netconfig.

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

[Charlie Bursell]

I teach this in all my classes!

NEVER use hard-coded paths to files or directories under the Cloverleaf root.  This can be a very insiduous error as the paths will work until you delete the old version of Cloverleaf.

There are several methods:

1. Use relative paths since you know the working directory is the process directory.  For example, to access the file named data.txt in the site directory:  set path ../../../data.txt.

2.  Use the environment variables like HCIROOT/HCISITEDIR  which are available via the global env array or the supplied global variables like HciRoot and HciSiteDir.  For example to access a file named names.csv which is placed in a directory under the root named LOOKUPS:

(I prefer to use the file join command)

set path [file join $HciRoot LOOKUPS names.csv]

3.  You can really simplify by placing the files or directories directly under the process directory then all you need is the file or directory name.

[Richard Hart]

Robert.

I wrote a simple perl script as part of our migration from 3.5.5 -> 5.1 and this changed the hard coded lines to relative for paths and icons etc.

[Kevin Scantlan]

With all this discussion, I decided to test something out.  I created a link /hci/qdxroot to point to /hci/qdx5.4.1/integrator.  I went into the first line of tcl scripts and replaced #!/hci/qdx5.4.1/integrator/bin/hcitcl with #!/hci/qdxroot/bin/hcitcl  .  The scripts ran as before.  With this success, I then decided to change all scripts that use setroot.  For the first parameter, I changed /hci/qdx5.4.1/integrator to /hci/qdxroot  .  However, the scripts get a DBI error when trying to access the recovery database.   From the command line, I get a 944 synchronization error.  Is the path to the recovery database hardcoded either in the recovery database itself or the vista.taf file?

[Jon Blanchard]

I was wondering the same thing…

Migration Consultant
Coffee Regional Medical Center
Eastern Time Zone

[Charlie Bursell]

Kevin:

simply change the first line toL #!/usr/bin/env tcl  or #!/usr/bin/env perl

You will never have to change again

[Kevin Scantlan]

Recently installed version 5.8 on a server that had 5.6 on it.  We promoted one site to 5.8 .   So, which version of TCL does /usr/bin/env tcl point to ?  Version associated with 5.6 or associated with 5.8?

[Jon Blanchard]

We installed Cloverleaf 5.8 on a clean server and are using both 5.8 and 5.6.  Based on the response from entering “puts $tcl_version” within hcitcl, both versions use Tcl/Tk 8.4.

Migration Consultant
Coffee Regional Medical Center
Eastern Time Zone

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