Strategies for leveraging legacy solutions

Determine whether you will continue to use legacy solutions as-is, or use them as the starting point for developing LiveCycle ES4 assets. Consider following factors when you make a decision:

  • Your satisfaction with current solutions.

  • The resources required to maintain current solutions.

  • The resources required to upgrade legacy solutions so that you can use new LiveCycle ES4 features.

  • The benefits of using new LiveCycle ES4 features. (SeeWhat’s new in Workbench.)

    Continued execution

    After upgrading the environment to LiveCycle ES4, leave legacy items unchanged in the Processes, Resources, and Events views. Processes, resources, and events that were used in the LiveCycle 8.x environment are fully supported in LiveCycle ES4. Your solutions continue to function as they did in the legacy environment. This strategy is suitable for mature solutions that require no maintenance.

    Maintenance of legacy items

    Change legacy processes, resources, and events using Workbench while preserving their link to legacy runtime instances. After importing into LiveCycle ES4 applications, your processes, resources, and custom events continue to execute as LiveCycle 8.x solutions. However, when you preserve the link to legacy runtime instances, you cannot take advantage of new LiveCycle ES4 features.

    For example, edit a process to fix a bug. The changes affect existing process instances and new instances as the process is invoked. After you implement the changes, you can deploy the application. To propagate the changes to another environment, create a LiveCycle 8.x archive or update an existing LiveCycle 8.x archive.

    This strategy is suitable for solutions that completely satisfy your business needs, but require occasional maintenance.

    To maintain legacy items:

    1. Import legacy items to an application. (See Importing resources, processes, and events to applications.)

    2. Edit the items and deploy them or add to LiveCycle 8.x archives for deployment to production. (See Maintaining legacy run-time instances.)

    Progressive development

    Break the link between legacy processes, resources, and events and their legacy runtime instances and create full-fledged LiveCycle ES4 application assets:

    • Take advantage of new features.

    • Develop assets independent of their legacy runtime counterparts.

    • Legacy processes, resources, and events remain intact.

    To create LiveCycle ES4 assets from legacy items:

    1. Import legacy items to an application. (See Importing resources, processes, and events to applications.)

    2. Break the link to the legacy runtime instance. (See Upgrading legacy solutions to LiveCycle ES4.)

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