Documentation Center

Forward compatibility of your GUI extension

Upgrading to a newer version may break your GUI extension: the XML format of content items may change, and the API and behavior of GUI controls may also change. Your own changes to the GUI remain unaffected, as do your Models.

XML format

The XML format of content items in the Content Manager is expected to change in future releases. This means that any of your customizations that directly reads or writes XML may need to be adjusted to deal with this change. Two cases, specifically, will need adjusting:

  • A custom Data Extender that reads or writes XML will need to be rewritten for the new XML format. The business logic of the Data Extender would remain unaffected, but the parsing of the XML (say, using XPath queries) will need to be updated.
  • Extensions that directly access XML, rather than calling a method, need to be adjusted accordingly.
Controls
Both the API and the behavior of any and all controls in the GUI may change in the future. For example, if your customization uses the Draw() method for a table, this method is not guaranteed to still exist in a future SDL Tridion release.

The following areas will remain unaffected, and will stay supported through future upgrades:

Configured GUI changes
If you add buttons, context menu options, Ribbon tabs, and similar configured GUI changes, those custom controls remain unaffected by an upgrade.
Custom Model
Any Model you design remains backward compatible, the basic framework of Models will remain unaffected.