[API - Breaking change] Geospatial North and South attributes renamed on Dataverse 6.2

[Juan Pablo Tosca]

Dear Dataverse Community,

We hope this message finds you well. As part of our ongoing commitment to improving the Dataverse platform, we have recently made a significant change to the API. While we always strive to maintain backward compatibility, there are instances where this becomes challenging due to the nature of the changes being introduced.

The Change: Paul Dante reported on 4645 that 2 fields were mislabeled as "north longitude" and "south longitude". We have fixed this on 6.1 replacing these fields with "north latitude" and "south latitude".

The Impact: Unfortunately, this update may break existing integrations and applications that rely on the previous API behavior. We understand that this can be disruptive, especially for those who have built custom solutions around the existing API endpoints

Our Commitment: Rest assured that providing backward compatibility is always a priority for our team. However, in this specific case, due to the critical nature of the fix, maintaining full backward compatibility may not be feasible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your understanding.

What You Need to Do:

1. Review Your Integrations: If you have any applications or services that interact with the Dataverse API, please review them to ensure they can accommodate the changes. Feel free to use our environment at beta.dataverse.org where you can test this change today. 

Best regards,

Juan Pablo Tosca | Dataverse Development Team.

[Juan Pablo Tosca]

Thanks to Jim Myers for letting me know that I made a mistake in the body of this email. Just to clarify, this change is releasing with 6.2 not 6.1.

Best regards,

Juan Pablo Tosca | Dataverse Development Team.

[Bethany Seeger]

Hello, 
It's my understanding that blocks get reloaded during an upgrade.  We did this during a recent upgrade.   Did this change effectively create two new fields?  

I am now seeing 6 fields in the UI when moving from 5.14 to 6.6 - the original 4 and two more: (these are in 2x2 columns in the UI, I just can't post a screenshot)

Westernmost (Left) Longitude 

Easternmost (Right) Longitude 

Northernmost (Top) Latitude 

Northernmost (Top) Latitude 

Southernmost (Bottom) Latitude 

Southernmost (Bottom) Latitude 

 

Did we do something wrong?

Best,

Bethany

[James Myers]

Prior to version 6.2, the north/south fields were misnamed as northLongitude and southLongitude. The v6.2 release should have automatically updated them, but I could imagine scenarios like installing a 6.2+ version of the geo block prior to running the 6.2 war might have installed the new fields beside the old fields, which were then updated when the war ran to also have the same names/display text. (If the war ran first, it would have changed northLongitude to northLatitude and then updating the block would just have overwritten the already updated field w/o changing it).

 

W.r.t. a fix, you’ll probably need to delete the incorrect fields (one north, one south) from the database – we don’t yet have an API for it. I’d guess the ones with higher ids are the ones to delete – the ones with lower ids should be the ones people were using. If the new fields haven’t been used that shouldn’t be too hard. If they have already, you’ll need to first change any datasets that use the new ones (via UI or in the db) so that everything is using the same copy of that field.

 

-- Jim

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Dataverse Users Community" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to dataverse-commu...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dataverse-community/a145704a-7b01-4c31-9afb-0290eddadefbn%40googlegroups.com.