If there a chance of a version downgrade XML exporter?

Development
1

What Phil suggests sounds logical… but I don’t think that the Gramps .gpkg/.gramps export works that way.

I recently tried to export an object from 6.0.1 to use in a 5.2.2 test. (And I wanted to share it as a Media Object example file here on Discourse.) And found no way to get the data in.

There were no incompatible elements in the body of the data. But the 6.0.1 (schema and application version) header data blocked it from being read in 5.2.2. Even when the only difference was the Gramps version that wrote the file.

Is there any possibility of “Lowest Common Denomination” downgrade XML Exporter plugins?

Where you select a schema and where it complains if there is any data containing unsupported data model records? (With the option to omit that incompatible data.)

Or it suggests the lowest schema that supports the current dataset.

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2

There might be specific threshholds, needing different Exporters addons:

  • for 4.2.8 users
  • For users of the last 32bit Windows compatible verson

For incompatible data, perhaps the modern content could be saved as an attribute (labeled with the schema) with a modern XML data as the “attribute value”? This would enable the opportunity to make a post-processing tool that looks through attributes and folds the modern XML data back in.

(Unlike the GEDCOM importer, which writes Notes with munged clippings of unknown/custom .ged tag data with annotations. Leaving content that cannot easily be cleaned with automation.)

3

It could be that this data needs to use GEDCOM to be transferred?

Then have to use an old PortableApps Gramps version to import and to write an XML schema version that will be compatible with sharing?

A Feature Request (0013804: [XML Exporter] Extraneous XML chunks exported with "Do not include…) exists for an option to skip writing certain chunks. Including: name-formats, namemaps, Tags, bookmarks, media relative path.

4

Both v5.2 and v6.0 use the same XML schema version. There appears to be a bug where v5.2 still thinks that it is using v1.7.1.

Just change the XML version in your v6.0 export to v1.7.1 and it should import correctly.

5

I tried that but it then it complained about trying to open with an older version of Gramps.

So do both the XML and application version have to be downgraded?

6

It looks like the XML import for v5.2 just checks that the XML version <=1.7.1 but this is a bug. It should be able to import 1.7.2, so you can just change the version number in your XML.

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7

Or I could tweak 5.2.2 for a more persistent workaround?