How to install two versions of DVD on same laptop

Question

Summary

Content

The installation for DVD 3.0 says "NOTE : Upgrading your Oracle Data Visualization Desktop to version 12.2.3.0.0 will mean that new project exports will be incompatible with earlier versions of Oracle Data Visualization both on premises and in the cloud. Therefore you are advised not to upgrade your Data Visualization Desktop until those deployments have also been updated."

Hmmm...this is a major disadvantage of moving to the latest release.  Consultants that connect to multiple client systems need to be able to operate in different versions, *especially* if newer content is incompatible with older versions.

So....is there a reasonable way of installing DVD in two different directories?  is it as simple as changing the installation directory to include a version number?  Is there a technote on this?

Thanks in advance.

Dan Vlamis · Answer

Thanks, Adam.  Sorry to see the response.  I suppose for now, I'll have to rely on coworkers for older versions.  please do consider this for future versions.  You *really* need this to support the consulting community, but you also need it for any serious development community.  Or, just don't ever upgrade DVD

Gianni Ceresa · Answer

Hi,

Based on above answers you can have a second Windows account you use for the newer/older version of DVD. %localappdata% is based on the user, so a new Windows account will have a totally independent %localappdata%.

I'm not saying it's a nice clean and livable solution, but it's that or VMs

Adam Bloom-Oracle · Answer

Sorry - It's not possible or supported to install two versions of Desktop on the same machine. We may look to relax this in future.  For now, whilst it may in theory be possible to play around with the %localappdata% environment variable in order to have (say) a set of user data for one version pointing to one location and a different set for the other version.  Problem would be if you forgot to change the variable and installed the later version it would upgrade some of the user data from the earlier version's user data. Such a convoluted workaround is not in keeping with the ethos behind the Desktop product and therefore is not something we can support.