General Export / Import

Developments
1

Note Regarding Export/Imports:

  1. Current exports as a universal format seem to be insufficient so may be deprecated.
  2. Export single entities to Word and PDF should be added on their respective menus on the ELN.
  3. A new universal format for import/exports should be provided. More likely based in the new XLS Master Data format + Datasets.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Best,
Juan

1 Like
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I agree,
but regarding exports:
I’d prefer a more programming-friendly format for entries, such as JSON.

3 Likes
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+1 for JSON.

Please, consider RDF formats.

4 Likes
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+1 Please consider JSON for file exports as well.

5

Thanks for the update!
Exporting entities to a “format for reports” (e.g. PDF) (2.) is something that has already been requested by a few of our users at BAM.

+1 for JSON and RDF as well.

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We want this format to work symmetrically, the same for imports and exports.

Regarding JSON:
I see this as a possibility, technically we can perfectly say that the JSON format will be the JSON dialect accepted by the V3 API and we could that way import/export using data binding to existing DTOs. And provide a list of entities on the same order we give on the XLS.

This means we could also add support to read the export data using our V3 API facade what is a plus for scripting.

The challenge will come with the import ordering of the JSON objects on an empty instance, this is a solved problem with the XLS import/export that took some real effort. But we could again, reuse the same business logic.

Then the remaining question is, if we have a single file with a list of 100K objects. How useful is this for scripting, what are the use cases?

So I would give +1 to JSON given that we have meaningful use cases to cover.

Regarding RDF:
This one is a harder sell for me. We currently have no direct data binding from RDF so is a big undertaking to write the parsers and is only really useful for instances using semantic annotations. We are currently working on adding the needed features to the UI so people start to use them more widely.

The main use cases that I imagine is to export to other system accepting RDF and import from other systems giving RDF. Do we have currently anyone using such systems? Maybe someone can point out anything I’m missing here?

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Dear Juan, I am using internally JSON to represent and serialise-deserialise the schema / metadata of an instance. I am thinking more along these lines, for those of us who want a way to quickly spin up test instances with a given schema.