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Friday, August 21, 2009

SugarCRM Upgrade Problems

Sometimes technical issues seem to come in waves. This past week, the Sugar Forums highlighted that point quite well. Multiple users reported unusual behavior when attempting to perform upgrades to varying versions of SugarCRM.
Some of the challenges that were reported included:
  • Errors such as: Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/xxxxx/public_html/xxxx/data/SugarBean.php on line 2322
  • Inability to click Browse button to select upgrade files or Browse button missing
  • Errors when clicking Upgrade Wizard link that prevent upgrade wizard from displaying altogether
The common thread between all of these issues is that SugarCRM in part relies on files stored in the /cache/upload directory in order for the feature to work correctly. Temporarily renaming the /cache folder prior to attempting to access the Upgrade Wizard feature appears to correct the problem.
It is strongly advised that one NOT delete the existing /cache directory as an alternate solution. The danger in doing so is that the /cache/upload directory is used to store e-mail attachments, documents and other files related to Sugar. Deleting that directory would in turn cause those files to be lost. DO NOT DELETE the directory.
Once you have successfully upgraded -- assuming the rename trick solves the problem -- the current /cache/upload directory contents will need to be merged with the contents of the /upload directory that resides in the renamed /cache directory.

4 comments:

  1. It is nice to see comments that actually have content and ideas. I have seen a lot of SugarCRM support that follows a disturbing pattern of telling someone to do something else in order to fix their problem. For example, I see lots of comments like have you run silent install? Though their maybe some benefit from this like seeing errors the fact is the persons comment is useless as is and sends someone off doing work without a plan or approach to solving their issue. This is typical of support teams who do not have the depth or just don't want to deal with the real issues.

    Your comments and the replies contained here provide actual solutions and also provide the user with a greater understanding of the package. This is of much higher value. There is the danger of course that someone would wreck their install but that is what backups are for.

    For me I wasted a lot of time trying to find support on Sugars upgrade for my one does not work either and the fix should be simple if I could get information on manually running the upgrade process.
    In some cases this could also solve the size limitation in that I could ftp part of the upgrade and do it bit by bit.

    Taking your idea further it would be beneficial if there was a manual upgrade help file added to the upgrade package so that when these failures occur we could simple know which files need to be replaced, added and removed. The sql scripts are simple so they should cause no issue.
    Even doing relationship or index rebuilds could be added in the comments.

    I think this would save a lot of grief.

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  2. I was able to get rid of my blank screen (which occurred after a 5.5.1 to 6.1.0 upgrade) solely by editing my php.ini file and setting the memory_limit to 256MB (as also recommended in the SugarCRM documentation). I restarted apache, and logged out of the SugarCRM instance and then logged back in. The blank screen was replaced by the proper Update Wizard display.

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  3. Great feedback to a problem that SugarCRM Admins run into. Thanks to all that participated in solving an issue that has given me two weeks of headache on four install and customizations.

    Kudos!

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  4. The issue with SugarCRM is that the upgrade process is very flawed in its approach, design, recovery and support.

    The memory issues are but one symptom of a lack of depth or caring which is common today with development groups. There is actually no excuse for blowing out memory so crudely and worse, to be left in a state where this might cause other problems.
    I assume there are actually a serious of simple steps that can be taken to recover from a number of upgrade issues such as the blank screen yet there does not seem to be any common area to look these solutions up and worse there are many useless posts that often are no better than "reboot fixes all" advise.

    It is a shame that with so many good features the teams working on SugarCRM do not save everyone a lot of grief by implementing methods that are more stable.

    For myself I am again running around trying to fix an upgrade error that should in theory be simple to reverse or track down and solve.

    Lets hope that after so many years of dev the team will finally start organizing upgrade support in a manner that is practical and for the users benefit.

    ReplyDelete

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