Restoring your DW/UD Configuration

If you're like like me and frequestly mess about with DW/UD standard toolsets without really knowing what's going on then here's a few tips to make sure you don't kill DW/UD outright..............
Avoid the Configuration blues!

The Problem!
Me ;) Messing about with things I don't really understand, or acting before I think. Yes, if you're like me then you love fiddling with the standard toolset in DW or UD. However, sometimes you dive in only to regret it hours later as you curse the software, machine, next door's cat and the fact that the day ends in "Y" :)

The Solution.
Before you embark on any editing of DW or UD the most important thing to do is:

BACK UP YOUR CONFIGURATION FOLDER!

This cannot be emphasized enough and with the introdution of the "Zip Suite Freeware Extension" there is really no excuse. You configuration folder holds all the code that makes up the DW/UD interface, the way it interacts and a hell of a lot more.

By backing this up you can take a kind of snap-shot of DW/UD at that time. Restoring your application is simply a case of copying your backed-up files into the configuration folder.

Case Study
One late Sunday night I was tinkering with a recordset and noticed that UD does not destroy the Recordset properly! It closes it but does not set it to nothing........................

Thinking I was a smart arse I them proceeded to edit the standard recordset server behaviour and added my extra code with a grin :)

No sooner had I clicked the OK button I realised my errror!!!!!!! Altering the standard recordset code now made all my previously applied recordsets unrecognisable by UD.

UltraDev uses "regular expressions" to find extensions that have been applied to a page. It will scan a page and try to find a match for a certain string expression, if it does it will acknowledge this by translating the code for easy use within UD. It follows that if you edit an extension then the string UD looks for will be different from the original one!

I needed to restore my configuration folder but soon discovered that my back-up was an old version so I couldn't just copy the whole folder across - doh! After a lot of looking around the structure of UD and copying old files across I decided to ask for help.........................................

Waldo from UDzone suggested that I did a search within the configuration folder for any modified files within the date they were altered.

What a top idea!!!!! I fired up the Search fascility within Windows, located the UD configuration folder on my hard drive and set the search based on date.

search

The resulting search results gave me all the files that had been altered over the period specified and with this I was able to copy back my original files from my configuration back-up :)

TOP TIP: The standard Server Behaviours code resides in the following directory: Configuration\ExtensionData\MM

Conclusion.
Don't mess with things you don't understand.....................or back-up first and back-up regularly :)

This was brought to you by a Web Chimp @ Ultra-Dumb

Comments

I agree

August 26, 2001 by Steve Davis

Although my results weren't as catastrophic, it was a near thing.

All I wanted to do was add "justify" as a text alignment option.

I won't go on...

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