Feature Deprecation in the Jet Data Manager

Overview

Over time, some features in the Jet Data Manager will have lived out their usefulness and continue to exist in the product solely for backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility is a high priority for us, developing and testing for outdated features takes time that we could otherwise spend on new useful features.  For this reason, we have created a process for feature deprecation and marking features as deprecated in the product.

In a new release you may find a new setting, Deprecated Features , in the View menu:

When this is enabled, deprecated features are shown and can be used but will have “ (deprecated) ” added to their names to show you that they should no longer be used.  The setting is disabled in new projects and enabled for old projects that use one of the deprecated features.

When a feature is put on the deprecated list, we strongly recommend that you do not use the feature in new development.  It will not stop working over night, but at some point we will remove it from the product.

Process

The feature deprecation process consists of three steps:

1. Information

   The feature is marked as deprecated in the software and is hidden by default in new projects.

2. Warning

   If your project uses the deprecated feature, you will be warned that you should refactor your project to use a newer and better alternative.  When possible, we will create automatic up-grade tools.

3. Error

   The feature is removed from the product and you will get an error message if try to open projects and project versions that use the feature.

   The amount of time from when a feature is marked as deprecated until it is removed will depend on the feature.  We will move features with an automatic upgrade option or low usage faster than features with high usage or features that take more time to remove from a project.