Breaking Changes

In general, newer versions of CSPro can execute applications and process data created in earlier versions of CSPro, but occasionally there are significant changes that result in behavior that is different from the previous versions. This list, as well as the list of deprecated features, is intended to help users keep abreast of changes that may impact their applications or any external tools that were written to interact with CSPro specification and data files. For information on how to handle the changes, review the What's New page for the version when the change occurred.

CSPro 8.0

The specification files for files with the following extensions are now saved in JSON format: .bch, .cmp, .csprops, .dcf, .ent, .exf, .fqf, .ssf, .xl2cs, .xtb. The most significant change concerns dictionaries (.dcf), as any external tools that parse CSPro dictionaries must be modified to handle the new format.
In previous versions, newline characters were written to text data sources (and corresponding notes files) as two characters: "\n". Newlines in those contexts are now written as '␤', so when reading old data files, what was previously interpreted as a single character newline ("\n") will instead be interpreted two as characters: "\\n".
Lines written using File.write or filewrite are now terminated with a single "\n" character, no longer with "\r\n".
Creating dynamic value sets using Array objects is no longer possible.
The box / endbox syntax for recoding variables is no longer supported.
The templated reporting system introduced in CSPro 7.1 has been removed.
Android devices running CSEntry must be running version 5.0 (Lollipop) or higher.
It is no longer possible to override Excel to CSPro parameters from the command line, though some overrides can still be specified in the PFF.
CSWeb now requires PHP 8.

CSPro 7.4

The internal format of CSPro DB data sources changed and can no longer be opened in previous versions of CSPro.

CSPro 7.2

Synchronizing files and data using .pnc files is no longer possible.
Implicit compilation mode, which allowed for on-the-fly variable declarations, has been removed.

CSPro 7.0

The format of the notes file associated with Text data sources changed (as well as the extension from .not to .csnot).

CSPro 6.2

The fileexist function no longer returns true if the path exists as a directory (as opposed to a file).

CSPro 6.0

The format of the compiled data entry format changed (as well as the extension from .enc to .pen). CSEntry can no longer run .enc files.
The seed function returns a different sequence of random numbers.

CSPro 5.0

Specification and data files are saved in UTF-8 format with a BOM (byte order mark). Reading these files in external tools that expect an ANSI encoding may result in problems.