a quick way to test OpenClinica 3.2
For those of us who want to test release 3.2 before installing it, here is a quick way to do just that.
What we'll do is:
- rename the war to oc32.war
- let tomcat deploy it
- create a new, empty database oc32
- make a backup of our existing 3.1.2, 3.1.3 or 3.1.4 database
- restore that as oc32
- copy the directory openclinica.data
- modify datainfo.properties
- start oc32
start with the war
Start with downloading the zip with the war and then unzip it and rename the war to oc32.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 oc32.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 oc32 with encoding='UTF-8' owner=clinica;
\l
\q
sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/pg_dump openclinica > pg_dump_openclinica_20140402
sudo -u postgres /usr/bin/psql oc32 < pg_dump_openclinica_20140402
(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 oc32.data
datainfo.properties anyone?
If you like you can go through datainfo.properties, to edit it to your favorite settings. But the defaults work.
start oc32
As a last step, go to tomcat's manager/html and start oc32.
what to look for?
On https://docs.openclinica.com/release-notes/release-notes-openclinica-3.2 you can find a summary of what's new in this release.
Our two favorites are the stack-upgrade, to java 7 and tomcat 7, and the REST-implementation for XML, about which we will write a page shortly. The SubjectCasebook is a very welcome feature. Furthermore some fine back-end tweaking improved the speed of data-exports. Some users will be very happy with the option to download Audit-logs. And many users will be relieved to see that the maximum for text-fields and text-areas has been increased to a comfortable 3999 characters.
All in all more than enough reasons to upgrade!
one last thing
After you've evaluated version 3.2 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 April 2014