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[IDEA] Read properties from a "local" mirth.properties file after the default, stock mirth.properties file #5500

Open ChristopherSchultz opened 1 year ago

ChristopherSchultz commented 1 year ago

Similar to #5436, upgrades are often a hassle when trying to migrate changes to mirth.properties in the old version to the new version. Most of the time, you only want to customize a few things (e.g. keystore password, database URL and credentials, etc.) and everything else should be left alone.

With everything in a single file, you have to basically read the whole file every time and re-apply all changes separately.

If there were another file e.g. mirth.local.properties that was read immediately after mirth.properties – allowing you to override any of the default settings – it would make upgrades easier, and possibly allow automation.

ChristopherSchultz commented 1 year ago

There are a number of places in the code wheremirth.properties is loaded. I would recommend having a utility method to "load the configuration" and have all those places call the unified "load configuration" method, which can then be expanded to load an extra configuration file.

ChristopherSchultz commented 1 year ago

Maybe DefaultConfigurationController is already that place?

ChristopherSchultz commented 1 year ago

Hmm. Mirth has code paths that appear to update the on-disk properties file which may make this request essentially impossible.

NoraTheExplorer commented 1 year ago

I like this idea. This would make migrations and updates much more comfortable.

ChristopherSchultz commented 1 year ago

Based upon my previous comment, I was thinking (a) maybe I can just concatenate my "custom properties" onto mirth.properties and (b) any re-writing done by Mirth would just take that into account.

Unfortunately, what really happens is that Mirth re-writes the properties file and randomly re-orders the default and overridden properties so that you get a combination of default and overridden ones taking effect. They must be using line-by-line parsing of properties instead of just using Properties.load() which would normally just use last-one-read-wins semantics.

So I'm not really sure whether there are any options other than requesting a feature such as this directly from Mirth.

I guess that means "yeah, I still want this."

pacmano1 commented 1 year ago

It's a great idea IMHO. Much like linux does include files for lots of services.