Blacklight 7.x deprecation of view overrides and paths forward

[jona...@dnil.net]

When I recently investigated updating our Rails app from Blacklight to the latest 7.19.2, I encountered a lot of deprecation notices. They were related to code both in my local app and a plugin trying to override parts of Blacklight views — specifically the “constraints” (ie search limits/query “breadcrumbs” display) area in the code I encountered, I’m not sure if it applies to more areas of view customization.

Looking into this more to see if I could get a start on changing logic to avoid deprecation warnings — I had trouble figuring out any non-deprecated way to achieve the overrides. After more research, I think it’s not totally worked out how to make these overrides keep working at all in future Blacklight 8, and that this affects plugins including blacklght_range_limit, blacklight_advanced_search, geoblacklight, and possibly spotlight.

I have documented what I found/understood, and some ideas for moving forward, hoping it will help start the community process of figuring out solutions to keep all this stuff working. I may not have gotten everything right or thought of everything, this is meant to help start the discussion, suggestions and corrections welcome.

https://bibwild.wordpress.com/2021/09/02/blacklight-7-x-deprecation-of-view-overrides-paths-forward/