Inconsistencies when exporting/importing lists or datasets usging XML formats

LabKey Support Forum
Inconsistencies when exporting/importing lists or datasets usging XML formats eva pujadas  2015-04-30 03:27
Status: Closed
 
As already announced in your documentation, validation in fields (both types of validation: regex and range) is not included in the XML definition when exporting fields, lists or datasets (studies):
https://www.labkey.org/wiki/home/Documentation/page.view?name=propertyFields

Additionally, we have realized that conditional formats, although they are included in the xml definition when exporting lists, they are ignored when importing (in datasets it works well).

About defaults, it seems that default values, although they are defined in the XML schema description, they are not exported in lists or datasets:
https://www.labkey.org/download/schema-docs/xml-schemas/namespaces/http_labkey_org_data_xml/namespace-summary.html
The default type of a field does not even seem to be defined in the XML schema.

Questions:
- Will the conditional formats and default values issues eventually be fixed? We have searched in your issue tracking database and they do not seem to be there.
- About exporting validation of fields, is it planned to include this feature in a early future release of LabKey? We would use this feature in the domain of psychological research, where quite often the same validation rule holds true for all fields of one survey.
Or, is there a reason why not to include validations in exports?

We are running LabKey 15.1.
Please, let me know if you need further details.

Thank you very much for your great support.
Eva Pujadas
 
 
adam responded:  2015-05-03 15:35
Hi Eva,

Thanks so much for reporting these discrepancies and including all the details.

  • Conditional formats should be imported from list archives, but it looks like the import code has a bug. We'll fix this (and add a test case so it continues to work) for 15.2. See https://www.labkey.org/issues/home/Developer/issues/details.view?issueId=23235
  • We have not yet added support for round-tripping default values/types and field validators through export/import. The only reason is that adding these properties will require a modest amount of design, development, and testing work, and current clients have not raised this as important for their use cases. We'd be happy to discuss options over email. (Note that the existing "defaultValue" element is not used during export/import, it's currently used only during meta data overrides.)
Thanks, Adam
 
eva pujadas responded:  2015-05-05 00:48
Hi Adam,

thanks a lot for your complete and fast answer and for creating the issue, which, BTW, is already resolved.

We will discuss internally the possibility about your offer to discuss options for including round-tripping default values/types and field validators.

Best, Eva