MySQL Bugs: #45083: Provide ability to store as plain XML file

Bug #45083	Provide ability to store as plain XML file
Submitted:	26 May 2009 6:19	Modified:	23 Jun 2009 13:23
Reporter:	Markus Fischer	Email Updates:
Status:	Won't fix	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Workbench	Severity:	S4 (Feature request)
Version:	5.0.30 OSS	OS:	Any
Assigned to:		CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
One of the practical features of DBDesigner was that it stored it's data as plain XML file.

The benefit lies within recording changes in a SCM system which allows a more useful history trail on a text file then on a binary file.

The application currently has the ability to open XML files properly. However, when saved, it gets written as ZIP again thus removing the XML.

How to repeat:
Not applicable; support for writing a MWB as XML is not available.

Many thanks for writing a feature request.

Unfortunately, I am not able to follow you here.

You will get plain XML when you unzip the file.

Was that what you are looking for?

Or what do you mean exactly?

My intention is to save the workbench file directory as XML, not zip, to provide more usefulness for SCMs.

Why?

A plain XML file, given the right circumstances, can be useful when using a source control management (SCM) system to keep track of changes done to models, to diff how they've evolved, who has made exactly what change, etc.

DBDesigner stored them only as XML, which was "nice" in this regard.

With "right circumstances" I mean: the XML is formatted used line feeds/carriage returns and indentation so it can be useful viewed by a human (not a long concatenation of strings). The way the XML inside the ZIP is currently stored is perfectly fine for this.

Interestingly, MWB has support to directly load an XML file. If I extract the document.mwb.xml from the mwb-ZIP, I can load it from MWB. However, once I save it, the contents is a ZIP again. I consider this behavior a bug or at least a gotcha, too (but that should probably go into another report?)

Thank you for the feature request.

Markus,

I discussed this with the developers. MySQL Workbench saves projects as .zip because they can contain additional binary files, not only the XML file describing the raw database schema (this is quite comparable to OpenOffice that stores embedded objects the same way).

There are no plans to change the file format of MySQL Workbench in the foreseeable future.

What about this issue? It could be really nice to have plain text files to control modifications history. Hope this feature be considered, this tool is awesome as is and even could be better =). Thanks in advance.