[mapserver-dev] Support for upgrading map files between version changes

[Lime, Steve D (DNR)]

Man, a tough one. I could see a script that could operate within two sequential versions, but something that operates on arbitrary versions seems like
a lot of work. How big a problem do folks think this is?

Another way to tackle this might be to have a tool that doesn’t necessarily do the conversion but reports errors for an entire mapfile. That is, you could
submit a mapfile from any version to the tool that ships with the target version and get an exception report. Right now you have to tackle errors
sequentially using shp2img or something like that- a painful process. If a user could get a complete report then they could handle the conversion as
necessary by writing their own scripts… We’d need a syntax checker that didn’t load underlying structures but did report errors.

Steve

From: mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Tamas Szekeres
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2012 3:39 AM
To: mapserver-dev at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [mapserver-dev] Support for upgrading map files between version changes

Hi Devs,

We have quite some backward incompatible changes from versions to versions in the map file syntax and it is very challenging for some of the users to keep their files up to date during the version upgrades.
It would be useful to have a tool (ie. a commandline app) which could provide this update automatically, but it's very difficult for me to imagine a reasonable framework which could provide an easy way for the developers to declare the changes which should be applied during the upgrades. I would probably think about a file where the developers could declare transactions and version numbers which would define the required modifications for a particular change in a particular version, and the upgrade framework could replay those transactions sequentially between the source and the destination version.
Furher requirement would be to save the Mapserver versions in the mapfiles automatically, so the application could get to know which transactions should actually be executed.

Do you have any experiences in this topic or ideas where to start with this?


Best regards,

Tamas



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