Re: PostGIS data loader / dumper - GSOC 2022 Idea

Hi

On Sat, 19 Feb 2022 at 22:51, Regina Obe <lr(at)pcorp(dot)us> wrote:

> In pgAdmin3, our ESRI shapefile loader /dumper GUI was installable as a
> plugin. We lost that feature with pgAdmin4.
>
> To get this feature back, I was thinking that our command line tools would
> be easier to integrate in pgAdmin4 than the gui
> and also solve the issue of our GUI not packaged on many OS.
>
> The command line tools I am thinking about are these that are part of the
> PostGIS code base and generally installable even on headless systems.
> shp2pgsql (ESRI shape file loader) and pgsql2shp (ESRI shapefile dumper)
>
> These could be set up in much the same way as how the Backup / Restore /
> export/import (call pg_dump, pg_restore, psql)
>

Makes sense.

>
> This would require the user to have PostGIS command-line tools and PostGIS
> in database installed to use it and the binaries in the PostgreSQL bin
> folder.
> For windows these files are always installed in PostgreSQL bin when PostGIS
> is installed. I think on Linux they are installed in system.
>

We could probably come up with a sensible way of setting the path with
reasonable defaults. I'd be inclined to have that as a separate setting
from the normal binpath (as we likely wouldn't have per-server versions,
except on Windows).

>
> Do you see any issues with the idea I've outlined in Idea 2:
>
> https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/GoogleSummerCode2022
>
> I haven't looked that closely at how those pieces in pgAdmin4 work so not
> sure how difficult the task and if it makes sense for a GSOC project.
>

It's certainly feasible for someone to do. We have infrastructure for
running external tools, so that part is easy. Adding a PostGIS binpath
would also be very easy. Most of the work would be designing and building
the wizard that the user would complete to generate the command that would
be run by the process manager. I don't know the intricacies of those
commands though, so I have no idea if this is a simple flow or something
that's complex with lots of inter-dependencies between options.

My main concern with this project would be on the mentoring side. How
familiar are you and Sandro with the pgAdmin codebase, particularly with
the newer React framework we're moving to now (which you should probably
add to your skills required list in place of Javascript)? The team can
offer advice and guidance of course, but if a student ends up needing a lot
of hand-holding, that might become more difficult.

--
Dave Page
Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com