On Sat, 19 Feb 2022 at 22:51, Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.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:
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.
