I have a new session which has been developed in our test server. However, we recently copied the live environment to test including the database. Now we lost all the customizations in test environments, except for the components in $BSE/application/.

I can re-create the same session number and copy all the components under the same VRC structure. I could get this session up and running with the old session.

However, as the details in Baan Tools are different from the runtime dd, we will lose everything if the session is re-compiled.

Question:
Is it possible to recover those session in Tools from the runtime dd? In other words, I would like to recover the forms, reports (script is fine).

Thanks for your help.

There is no tooling available to reverse engineer the dictionary information of formdumps and report objects.
Some hints that may soften the pain a little bit:
- Do a 'strings' on the form dump. This will return the fields, form commands etc.
- Send the report to an XML type device. In the XML that is produced, you will find a lot of layout information.

This has happened to us twice. The first time we had no choice, but to rebuild since someone decided dev/test companies did not need backups. Then the second time we had backups - what we could then do is build a new company and recover to it. Then export our changes from this new company and import to the original dev/test company. This is why when we refresh our test/dev companies we do not refresh company 000. Of course you have to decide if all of that recovery work is worth it. The second time was not as bad as the first, so we just opted to rebuild what we lost - but we could have went the restore route.

Thanks for you both, JaapJD and mark_h. We had full backup but I would not like to restore the whole server only because of this. This change did about 9 months ago but we did not release to live system.

However, things changed recently but the test server was rebuilt by copying from the live a few months ago.

As we still have the physical files which are easier to restore, the main things being lost are the forms and reports (not too many labels and messages). I did copy all the components back and the session works fine.

I think I have to update the forms and reports manually.

Thanks again.