# Upgrading parse-server from 5 to 8

**URL:** <https://community.parseplatform.org/t/upgrading-parse-server-from-5-to-8/4966>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [June 7, 2025, 10:58am UTC](https://community.parseplatform.org/t/upgrading-parse-server-from-5-to-8/4966 "2025-06-07T10:58:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![isokosan](https://community.parseplatform.org/user_avatar/community.parseplatform.org/isokosan/32/2039_2.png) [@isokosan](https://community.parseplatform.org/u/isokosan)\
**Post date:** [June 7, 2025, 10:58am UTC](https://community.parseplatform.org/t/upgrading-parse-server-from-5-to-8/4966/1 "2025-06-07T10:58:00Z")

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Hi! I finally started my journey to upgrade parse in two projects I’m maintaining, which both use v 5.6 to the latest version of parse.

I made good progress, yet I ran into an issue that I did not see (or missed) in the breaking changes and want to ask here.

In my cloud code before find / after find triggers I’ve noticed that I cannot use the `ParseObjectSubclass` supplied in the context under `objects` is no longer usable as a pointer in `ParseQuery`.

An example object like this was usable in v 5.6.0 and was cast to a pointer correctly:

```auto
 ParseObjectSubclass {
   className: 'Cube',
   _objCount: 2385,
   id: 'VOD-052755'
 }

```

However now in v8 unless I do `.toPointer()` on the object, I cannot use it in pointer queries.

Since I have a lot of calls throughtout my codebase and I don’t want to have to add `.toPointer()` on all of these, any ideas on what I can do?

I tried setting the `encodeParseObjectInCloudFunction` option to `false` but this was not the culprit.

Would appreaciate any input! Thanks!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![isokosan](https://community.parseplatform.org/user_avatar/community.parseplatform.org/isokosan/32/2039_2.png) [@isokosan](https://community.parseplatform.org/u/isokosan)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2025, 2:30am UTC](https://community.parseplatform.org/t/upgrading-parse-server-from-5-to-8/4966/2 "2025-07-24T02:30:37Z")

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I’ve since found out that this is happening exclusively in cloud code triggers. Opened an issue [here](https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server/issues/9831).