App state information & updating an app

Question

Hi,

Let's consider a hypothetical situation where:

• I have an app in the store.
• My app saves state information to the app local folder.
• I update my app in the store to a newer version.
• A user with an older version of my app updates his/her version of my app to the latest version from the store.

How is the state information from the older version propagated to the newer version? Will the files in the app local folder be preserved for the new version? If I want to test the update process locally before publishing to the store, what are the recommended steps to go about doing this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I ask because I'm not exactly sure of the "proper" way to test an update scenario. Is there documentation for such a scenario? If so, could someone point me to it?

Right now, all I do to simulate an update is to first deploy my older version, run the app to get some state information saved to the app's local folder. Copy the entire local state folder for the app and set aside. Deploy the new version of the app and then paste the entire local state folder from before into the newly deployed location and launch the app and see what happens.

Answer 2

Hi Law,

I will get back to you on this after doing some further research!

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 3

Hi Law,

You are probably doing the best you can for simulating your app being updated by you through the store.  I checked with the product team and they said that your settings and local files will be preserved.

-Jeff

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Jeff Sanders (MSFT)

Answer 4

Thanks for that. I wanted to be sure.

Something to note: I ran into an issue with pasting the local state folder as is. I had permission issues when my app runs with the pasted local state folder (I made sure that the local state folder wasn't set to read only). I had an issue with permissions when attempting to create a folder within the pasted local state folder. However, if I simply copied the contents of the old local state folder to the new local state folder things were fine. Don't know if anyone else will see this, but worth mentioning.

Thanks!