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How to use Replace Design to upgrade a forms tool

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A reader wrote me with this forms development question:

"...i am stuck right now with a problem and i need you help.

At the development process we are using two different workspaces: one for development and another for the production. We design, develop & test the forms and other tools in the development workspace. After the tests are done, we import this tool into production workspace. But every time that we upgrade a tool, on the importing phase we are losing all of previous data. Because of that every time we upgrade it, we export the data as comma separated values, import the form into the workspace, import the comma separated values and delete the old one. But this process make us lose the integrity of our data. Is there any other way to upgrade a form without losing data. as i said it is impossible for us to develop directly on the production workspace.

So this is where we stuck. I think this is a common problem that people can face but i searched a lot of forums and no similar problem anywhere."

Lucky for me, my colleague Josh addressed this quite simply: 

The answer is to use "Replace Design". While in the Forms tool in the production workspace select 'Replace Design...' from the File menu - then select the workspace containing the latest version of the tool that should replace the older production version.

Another note: when exporting data from the Forms tool use the 'Binary XML' option, rather than 'Comma Delimited'... that will ensure data integrity.

--abbott

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