jaro

This module (github) does with site/assets/files what Ryan's DatabaseBackups module does with the database:

• Backup site/assets
• Download ZIP archive
• Upload ZIP archive
• Restore site/assets

Motivation: This module can be the missing part for projects with content backup responsibility on the client's side: The client will be able to download DB and assets/files snapshots through the backend without filesystem access, thus backing up all content themselves.

Release state alpha – do not use in production environments.

Credits for the nice UI go to @ryan – I reused most of it and some other code from the DatabaseBackups module.

Thanks for all of your input on this topic.

If we get a 'go' from the customer and our tests succeed, we will likely be using ProDrafts.

If that fails and no feasible workaround can be found, we will look into ProcessPagesExportImport again.

Greetings,

a current client would like to stage some larger content changes, meaning they want to edit some pages and save them, review those changes, then go live with the changes only when reviews are complete. They want to stage preferably (but not necessarily) in a separate test environment. Some of their templates have repeaters and page tables.

I have looked into the following approaches:

• 2 environments, database dumps: While some large modifications can be staged, most other modifications have to be made in the production system directly, so not an option.
• 2 environments, site profiles: same as above.
• 1 environment, ProDrafts: Repeaters seem not to be supported by the module.
• 1 environment, VersionControl: Doesn't look like it works for repeaters.
• 1 environment, ProcessPageDraft: Probably works for repeaters (because it copies pages), but is still in beta and would require a large amount of testing.
• 1 environment, ProcessPagesExportImport (added to the core in 2017): Seems to work fine when used via the GUI. But module info states "Development version, not yet recommended for production use".

Is there more information on ProcessPagesExportImport, e.g. is this feature likely to be finalized within a year from now?

Does anyone have other ideas?

I have not looked into CSV import/export yet.

Regards,
Michael

Sorry for the even longer delay – as always, the weeks before christmas are the busiest of the year.

On 9.11.2017 at 11:09 AM, noelboss said:

Now, nuked is probably a strong word, sorry if that offended you, that was not my intention and I can change that.

No worries, I don't feel offended personally, it's just bad PR and that it kind of looks like some careless coding of this module caused data loss. I'd appreciate if you could reword or just remove the link.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

On 9.11.2017 at 11:09 AM, noelboss said:

with this issue, this is not the case anyway because the module can not handle the repeaters correctly and thus also not export its config corretly, thus the output is not a complete snapshot in the first place

I agree, but that's not how I meant it anyway, I was referring to the partial export vs. clean fail design choice.

Sticking to the second, I have added a blacklist of known incompatible fieldtypes (containing only repeater so far) for now so the module will not only skip incompatible fields, but refuse to export all fields with a clear error message in that case.

50 minutes ago, noelboss said:

I think a partial export is still better then breaking an entire system  So even if it does not do anything, it's still better to if-repeater-return than to do harm imho. You could still log a warning that there have been unsupported fields that need manual exporting so the user knows what fields need to be exported…

So far, I haven't heard of any case where using this module "breaks an entire system". However, you are claiming that it "nuked [your] system" in your article as well (linking here). I must say I'm really surprised to read about what sounds far worse than the problems mentioned so far by you or anyone else in this thread. Can you please provide some details on what happened there? Thanks.

7 minutes ago, noelboss said:

Thanks for looking into it @jaro!

Is there no possibility to check weather a field is / is used inside, a repeater and then treat it differently (or omitting it)? Since this solves a rather critical weakness of Processwire (imho), maybe @ryan can help out with this?

Fields could be omitted by type, but the output of this module would then not be a complete snapshot of templates and fields any more, which was its purpose in the first place. Do you think, such an incomplete snapshot (without repeater fields and similar) could still be useful for repeater field users?

Treating problematic fields differently could solve the problem, but the module would most probably have to be equipped with code for each problematic field type.

Yes of course, one or two hints from @ryan could be very helpful now

On 1.4.2017 at 5:31 PM, vmo said:

I had two repeater fields: "repeater1" and "repeater2", the "repeater1" should repeat the "images1" field and the "repeater2" should repeat the "images2",

the problem was each time I edited one of them and change the repeated field the other assumed that modification. Example: editing the "repeater1" and change the field to "image3" the "repeater2" instead of having the "image2" has the field to be repeated assumed the field "image3".

On 2.11.2017 at 1:26 PM, adoxus said:

The issue, which I'd like to call Agent Smith Bug, that caused a Repeater/RepeaterMatrix field copying itself onto other same type fields while erasing the contents of the fields happened to me inversely without warning.

On 10.10.2017 at 1:34 PM, netcarver said:

This issue hit me a while back too with the RepeaterMatrix field.

On 9.10.2017 at 11:38 AM, ICF Church said:

Hi i ran into the same issue und it cost me much time to find the culprit of it.

Thanks guys for all the feedback.

I looked into this a little, and I was able to reproduce an instance of the problem using VMO's description with two repeater fields 'rep1' and 'rep2' and two text fields 'text1' and 'text2'. The assignment of text fields to repeater fields got mixed up if and only if the AutoExportTemplatesAndFieldsModule was installed.

I could narrow down the problem onto my use of ProcessWire's $field->getExportData() inside a hook 'after' ProcessPageView::finished. The problem is triggered when this function is called on the repeater fields in that hook, so the function seems to have side effects. I have added a minimal showcase for this called 'BreakRepeaterFields module' to the git repository, see module info summary for usage.

To sum this up: I am pretty confident there is no bug in my code directly causing the faulty behaviour. On the other hand one could not say that there is a bug in ProcessWire either, as my module is using an internal method which is not part of the documented API.

Best I can do for now is to declare this module incompatible with repeater fields and ProFields.

3 hours ago, ICF Church said:

Hi i ran into the same issue und it cost me much time to find the culprit of it. Please at least post a big warning in the readme for users to be aware before installation since i suspect this can affect many users who have installed pro fields

@ICF Church README has been updated. Thanks for your feedback.

On 1.4.2017 at 5:31 PM, vmo said:

I had two repeater fields [...] the problem was each time I edited one of them and change the repeated field the other assumed that modification. [...] I hope you can find the issue it is a great module to use.

Hi, thanks for that bug report, and I'm glad you like that module! I hope I'll have some time to look into this soon. I have added it to the issues on github for now.

On 3.9.2016 at 1:59 PM, netcarver said:

Not sure if this is a good idea or not, but could this module be made to automatically export migrations that are compatible with Benjamin's migrations module? This would allow his module's interface to be used on the importing side to select which migrations to import.

Sorry it took me a while to answer, and thanks for the input and for trying it out!

The module is all about ProcessWire's built-in import/export functionality, merely exposing and automating it. For the moment I'd rather have it become good and stable in this than doing both formats mediocrely. For example, there are still issues with some common field types, and I want to look into special cases during import that are handled specially by the GUI when doing it graphically.

On 12.7.2016 at 5:01 PM, horst said:

Do you have used it with namespaced PW version 3 too?

In the meantime I did some tests with ProcessWire versions 2 and 3. The module itself worked without any changes both in v2 and v3 installations (thanks to ProcessWire's namespace magic), but I had to do differentiate in the import script. v1.0.1 contains that and some small fixes.

Thanks, and sorry, I just corrected that statement about your module.

Even if it cannot handle all field types that some other modules contribute, I hope I'll be able to improve my module to the point where it reliably warns about field types causing problems.

Thanks, horst

Using that version in our project, I have developed and tested for 2.6 only so far. It does not use namespaces, so 3.x will probably not load the module. I will adapt and test with 2.7 and 3.x as soon as my time allows, hope to get to that within the next two weeks too.