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Thoughts from David Cornelius

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I haven't used Delphi's Data Explorer all that much in years past but in my current job, we maintain hundreds of small accounting programs for dozens of clients, each using a different database and most of which we have backups for testing and support. I had created FireDAC connection definitions for about a dozen of them so I could easily switch between them at design time and view tables and structures from within the IDE. I've found this very convenient and have grown fond of the feature.

I've known that upgrading even minor versions of Delphi uninstalls GetIt packages (which is why I wrote AutoGetIt) but did not know that any Data Explorer definitions would also be lost. After upgrading from 12.1 to 12.2 this morning, I loaded a project group I was working on yesterday and suddenly encountered several Definition [xxx] is not found in [...FDConnectionDefs.ini] error messages.

At first, I panicked, thinking I would have to tediously recreate all those connection definitions. But I noticed the error message listed the file where it expected to find the definitions and figured I should look in that folder to see if there was any way to recover the ones I had established before the upgrade. 

Sure enough, I found a few .BAK files that were date/time stamped with past dates, one just a few days earlier. I made a copy of the most recent backup, deleted the new, nearly empty .INI file that was created during the Delphi upgrade, then renamed my copied backup to the default filename as shown in the error messages. When I restarted Delphi, all my database connection definitions were back!
 

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