Windows Upgrade 2.9.1 to 3.0.1

OpenEMR Upgrade in Windows XP & Vista - Ver 3.090411 by Joe Holzer IDEA MAN http://www.holzerent.com for contact info.

This writeup is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. This writeup explains how to upgrade OpenEMR in Windows using Xampp for a localhost (stand-alone) or as a LAN server only. For use with a web server, please follow the instructions for Linux. OpenEMR is actually designed to run in Linux, so some problems occur trying to port to Windows. If you have been using a version earlier than 2.9.1dev, your configuration requires an external SQL-Ledger, so these instructions may not apply, as I have no way to test that upgrade. This file generally uses the right leaning slash convention for commonality, except where specific Windows protocol will be required, where they are shown as left leaning. Install will be at C:\

This presumes you have an earlier version which is using an external GACL. This will allow for earlier versions of MySQL than current 5.1 to also update, though for earlier that MySQL 4.1 as found since Xampp 1.4 at least, you might require separate steps for each version of MySQL, available at their website. That is unlikely. You will need the prefixMod.php file available from http://bradymd.com/prefixMod.tar.gz which can be untarred using 7zip (available on the internet free).

If you have a current real data setup in C:\xampp, Exit Xampp then rename C:\xampp\.. as something else (eg oldxampp). Make certain you have multiple copies of the old ../mysql/data/ openemr, gacl & ../htdocs/openemr/ documents directories with all their files.

Use the newest simple combined Xampp-Openemr.zip file, available at http://downloads.sourceforge.net/openemr/xampp-openemr-3.0.1.zip which you will extract to C:\ and verify you can login with admin : pass and put the prefixMod.php file in ../htdocs/ I also urge you to rename c:\xampp\mysql\winmysqladmin.exe as something else to prevent crashes from pressing the Admin buttons on the new Xampp interface (you will see they appear different from earlier versions). As before, you need only press Start for the Apache and MySQL to run OpenEMR, then Stop both and Exit when turning OpenEMR off.

Again exit Xampp and rename the newest ..mysql/data/openemr folder something else (eg newopenemr). Copy the old Documents folder to the new by overwriting the new. Copy both the old gacl & openemr data folders to the new ../data/ folder.

In Windows, run the C:\xampp\mysql\bin\mysql_upgrade.exe which will find and upgrade the files. If any are not upgraded, you will be informed, and those you will have to repair per instructions you can find elsewhere in the OpenEMR forums. But there is little likelyhood of having the problem.

Again start the Apache & Mysql and then run the browser to localhost/openemr/sql_upgrade which will prompt for your earlier OpenEMR version, and bring the old data to current format.

Then in the browser run localhost/prefixmod.php and enter the desired fields. Top and bottom should read "gacl" with the user field reading "root" and the password field blank (omit the "" shown) and press to continue. When that has completed, copy all files which have the "gacl_" prefix from within the ../data/gacl/ folder to the ../data/openemr/ folder. You should now have your previous real data available in the new setup, with logins and permissions as previously set for gacl.

The new setup has been verified to work as a server with all versions of XP, and should work as well with Vista. It crashed, however, when I tried to set it to work as a direct server in Win 98 SE, so I would suspect that NT would be the earliest possible. If anybody else knows differently, please let us know. However, any OS with a network addressable browser should be able to be used as a dumb client (ie all processing actually occurs on the server, the client is merely a workstation), which could mean as far back as Win 95 at least. Windows networking limits in Vista, however, can be a problem, so the best Windows to use as a server is XP.

Once you verify you have your real data available with the new setup, delete the gacl folder and the renamed newopenemr folder. Only delete your old xampp once you have made backups of the new setup. Backups now will require the Documents folder as before, but only the openemr data folder, as gacl is included therein.

You should now have all your prior real data in the latest format with internal gacl (3.0.1) OpenEMR working with Xampp 1.7 and MySQL 5.1 If you made changes to the earlier software which are not part of the 3.0.1 release CVS, those will have to be reviewed to include in the 3.0.1 by your IT guys like Rod, Jason, Brady, etc. (and of course, me. Have fun ;-)

Author:
Joe Holzer Idea Man
http://www.holzerent.com