726232 - handle loss of search engine metadata without losing default engine ordering

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

In bug 699856, we're migrating the search service's store of engine metadata to JSON. As part of that change, we considered immediately deleting the previous sqlite database as part of the migration, to avoid that data hanging around indefinitely. We might avoid doing that immediately and instead just let the data hang around for a while to support the downgrade case (no worse than bug 341833), but it raises the issue of how we deal with potential search engine metadata loss.

The current meta data we store is:
a) "hidden" engines (used when you "remove" a shipped search engine)
b) aliases (bookmark keyword equivalents for use in the URL bar)
c) various update attributes (the search engine update service is rarely used)
d) custom engine order in the drop down

I think a-c aren't major issues (in the rare event that we somehow lose the data, you can re-hide engines and re-add aliases manually), but d) is a little sub-optimal - we could revert to the default order instead of falling back to alphabetical ordering, and doing so is pretty trivial.

Comment 1

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Attachment: patch

This falls back to default ordering if there ends up not being any metadata information.

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

I can't say for sure that this is no longer relevant, so adding the fxsearch annotation so that we can check.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Bug 1642995 will help fix this.

Comment 5

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Bug 1642995 has fixed this by moving the flag alongside the json - if the data is lost, the flag will be lost as well. This will let us start afresh properly.