before we start

This page was written in 2016 and since then the EDC-world has seen the first release of LibreClinica. We're very enthusiastic about this successor of OpenClinica and we recommend it very much. If you want to know more about LibreClinic, you can start here. On this page you can read more about the difference between OpenClinica and LibreClinica.

a quick way to test OpenClinica 3.12

OpenClinica 3.12 has been released and not much attention was given to it. Strange, because this release has at least one nice extra feature: batch CRF migration. And that feature does exactly what is promises: migrate all your CRFs to a new version. Furthermore the writing of Rules has been made a bit easier and there's some performance increase. And personally we are very happy that the bug was fixed that prevented CRFs with hidden fields from being Marked Complete. All in all: upgrade is recommended.
See https://docs.openclinica.com/release-notes/release-notes-openclinica-3.12 for more information.

I'll try that on my laptop first

If you want to take safe approach: install it on a laptop. That will give you the opportunity to play around. We've created a short 10-minute-video which is a bit misleading, because the complete installation takes about 30 minutes. Just hit the video-pause-button when your laptop can't keep up with the video. In the text below the video you will find the links to the appropriate files.

testing on a server

For those of us who want to test release 3.12 before installing it, here is a quick way to do just that.
What we'll do is:

  1. download the war and rename it to oc312.war
  2. let tomcat deploy it
  3. create a new, empty database oc312
  4. make a backup of our existing 3.x database
  5. restore that as oc312
  6. copy the directory openclinica.data
  7. modify datainfo.properties
  8. start oc312

start with the war

Start with downloading the zip with the war and then unzip it and rename the war to oc312.war. Once you've done that, copy the war to tomcat/webapps. Tomcat will start deploying it, but it will not be able to start it, because there is no corresponding database. If tomcat does not deploy the war automatically, check with ls -al if tomcat is the owner and if not, issue chown tomcat:tomcat oc312.war

copying the database

We assume that you will want a copy of your existing database and the way to do that is making a new, empty database. Then making a dump of your production database and restoring that to the new one.

sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/psql
create database oc312 with encoding='UTF-8' owner=clinica;
\l
\q

sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/pg_dump openclinica > pg_dump_openclinica_20161010
sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/psql oc36 < pg_dump_openclinica_20161010

(The \l is to check if the creation of the database was successful and the \q to quit psql.)

don't forget the data

Now before we start we must copy the data-directories and we do that with:

cd /usr/local/tomcat
sudo -u tomcat cp -r openclinica.data oc312.data

datainfo.properties anyone?

If you like you can go through datainfo.properties, to edit it to your favorite settings. But the defaults work. Be aware that also in this version the location of the datainfo.properties is now oc36.config in the tomcat directory!

start oc312

As a last step, go to tomcat's manager/html and start oc312.

and how about tomcat?

Maybe you have been using tomcat6 and now you must upgrade to tomcat7. And maybe you must have both living on the same server: is that an option? O yes it is. Take a look at tomcat 6 & 7 for detailed info.

one last thing

After you've evaluated version 3.12 and decided that indeed you want to upgrade, make a backup first! Do it for example as described here and when you've done that, store the files on another server and a tape and burn them on CD. Well, you get the picture.

Other how-to-pages can be found here.

this page was last reviewed June 2020