Export/import functionality for projects

[antineutron]

I'm thinking it would be useful to have something like this, partly for doing a manual backup of a repository and partly for moving projects between DevTrack installs. I'm thinking it should be a single tar.gz or zip file containing:

• Project data - exported in some standard format such as XML or JSON files and stripped of all primary keys
• Git or Subversion repository as a directory
• Attachments as a directory (exported from the DB if they're being stored as blobs - makes it easier to extract the files from the backup)
• Metadata - date of backup, user who took the backup, possibly some kind of user-entered comment, maybe also some data for re-creating the primary keys?

The import process would then be:

• Check for existing project - if one exists, warn the user - needs some thought about how to handle the situation i.e. can we somehow merge the data back into the existing project? (I'm thinking just overwrite it)
• Put the repository in place
• Load all the XML data back into the DB - if we have primary key info, preserve PKs (optional flag to throw them away?)
• Load the file attachments back in

A very basic "Dump project without primary keys" would be handy for doing a transfer from installation A to installation B.

[antineutron]

Just thought of something: all the stuff contained "within" a project - project details, tasks, time, milestones, etc - can be easily exported and imported as a single unit. However, anything that involves users - user details, history, who logged time, task assignments etc - is "site-wide" and doesn't fit neatly into a self-contained "project dump".

Notes and ideas:

• We shouldn't include a dump of user accounts with a project dump - I'm thinking that at some point, project admins should be able to export a dump of the project, and they shouldn't have access to e.g. user password hashes
• We're using email addresses as the "username", so we could insert an email address and name instead of a full user record (that's basically all we're storing anyway, except possibly a password hash)
• The system admin (not project admin) should be able to dump the user account details separately

I'm thinking this could be used partly for backup/restore functionality, partly for convenience (one big dump of the whole thing for the project admin to do... things with) and partly for moving/copying entire projects between servers (e.g. copy projects from the live system to the dev system so you can test upgrading devtrack).

[antineutron]

Also, if we can make sure all our URLs use some unique non-primary-key field, that means that throwing away primary keys should make no functional difference to the system at all, making dump/restore much easier :-)