What % of .ascx controls are overwritten on upgrades?

[Former Member]

I'm trying to customize every aspect of my commerce site, and that inevitably includes modifying the standard .ascx controls. Are any major changes made to this in upgrades, and if so, are they well documented per file? I'm happy to go through and change any and all of the 288 .ascx files that I need to, but I don't necessarily want to do that every single time I upgrade to a new patch level.

Is there any other way to take control of how each .ascx is positioned and displayed? I just can't get deep enough by simply changing the .master and .aspx files.

Thanks,

Derek Perkins

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Derek,

Every .ascx not in the plugins directory is overwritten on upgrade. As is every .aspx file.

If you can not acheive what you want in master pages and CSS, there is no other way than to change the source files.

All files are backed up during the upgrade, but there is no attempt to track custom changes.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Though not the best news for what I'm trying to achieve, I'm glad that you clarified that for me.

I realize that it isn't tracking custom changes, but in the upgrade notes, is there detailed information anywhere saying what changes were made specifically to each file? It seems to me like there wouldn't be major changes to most of the control files and that more would be done in the backend dlls and APIs. That way I could apply the important coding changes to the files I need to, rather than reapplying all my customizations to every single file.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

You can use a tool like WinDiff (I believe that's the name) to compare text files recursively in folders. That should at least tell you which one changed and which ones you can just overwrite with the backed up version that has your customizations. I have also used Visual SourceSafe to compare windows folders.

Steve

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

You would need to do something like Steve suggested. A source control tool would probably do a decent job of identifying the changes as well.