549736 - Consolidate import, export, backup, restore in toolkit places modules

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Places, defect)

Description

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

bug 546942 is going to move importExportService from browser to toolkit.
at that point, since both import/export and backup/restore are in toolkit, could make sense to build up a single (and async!) import/export/backup/restore component.

It should just take care of creating an internal rapresentation of the data to export, and pass it to a writer (either json, html or any future format).

notice the actually we have not changed the html format to keep compatibility with Firefox 2.x, since this version is discontinued, we could now also expand the format to get tags (delicious format with tags="tag1, tag2, tag3" sounds good enough) or whatever we can insert into json. Provided this won't create issues to Firefox 3.x+ (that should not happen).

Comment 1

[Robert Kaiser]

We should continue to be able to _im_port the Firefox 2.0 format at least, esp. as SeaMonkey 2.1, based on Mozilla 1.9.3, will move to places bookmarks but any version before that still uses the same old bookmarks.html format we had in the xpfe-based Mozilla suite (which is probably the same format as FF 2.0 had).
Also, a number of tools probably expects something like the old format (and I think those tools or export to other browsers are the main application of HTML export), so we should not divert too far from it. Extending it with further attributes should be fine in any case, though, I believe.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

the problem was EXPORTING bookmarks.html so that it was compatible with Firefox 2, not importing it.
but i see that if seamonkey has the fx2 impl, that is a problem.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

Current SeaMonkey 2.0 uses the old implementation, 2.1 will probably move to places instead.
For knowing what we really understand for import in 2.0, it's probably best to create some files with those proposed extensions and just try importing there and see what happens.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

well, for example you can try just adding an unknown property to a bookmark in a valid bookmarks.html. for example try adding TAGS="tag1, tag2". the code should skip it since it does not know about it, while FX2 was instead bailing out.

Comment 5

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

Dependencies are fixed - what else needs to be done here?

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

export to html, import from json, export to json.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

changing scope, instead of a single component, a couple modules would do. We already have BookmarkHTMLUtils.jsm, we just need one for backups.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

we don't need this tracking bug, the remaining work will continue in bug 822200