Is there a way to open a Zope DB in .Net?

Question

Hi,

I need to upgrade an old system based on Zope, I need to be able to export the data to something like SQL Server...does anyone know of a way I can open the Zope DB in .NET or directly export it to SQL Server?

Thanks, Kieron

Answer 1

The first important thing to note is that the Zope Object Database (ZODB) stores Python objects in its hierarchy. Therefore, getting "data" out of the ZODB generally does not make sense outside of the Python language. So to some extent, it really depends on the type of data you want to get out.

If the data you're seeking is files (such as HTML, documents, etc), you might be able to stand up a Zope server and turn on something like WebDAV or FTP and extract the files that way.

The way you've described it, however, I suspect the data you seek is more fine-grained data elements (like numbers or accounts or some such thing). In that case, you'll almost certainly need Python of some kind to extract the data and transform it into some format suitable to import into SQL Server. You might be able to stay inside the .NET world by using IronPython, but to be honest, I would avoid that unless you can find evidence that IronPython works with the ZODB library.

Instead, I suggest making a copy of your Zope installation and zope instance (so you don't break the running system), and then use the version of Python used by Zope (often installed together) to mount the database, and manipulate it into a suitable format. You might even use something like PyODBC to connect to the SQL Server database to inject the data -- or you may punt, export to some file format, and use tools you're more familiar with to import the data.

It's been a while since I've interacted with a ZODB, but I remember this article was instrumental in helping me interact with the ZODB and understand its structure.

Good luck!

Answer 2

I am a Plone web developer, and Jason Coombs is correct. The ZODB is an Object Data Base, and contains python objects. These objects can be python code, data, meta-data, etc and are stored in a hierarchy. This is very different from the world of SQL tables and stored procedures. (The growing NoSQL movement, shows that Zope is not the only one doing this.) Additionally, since these are complex python objects you really want to be working on the ZODB with the version of python it was created with, or make sure that you can do a proper migration. I don't think that you will be able to do this with IronPython.

Without knowing what you are trying to get out of the ZODB, it is hard to give specific advice. As Jason suggested, trying WebDAV/FTP access to the ZODB might be all that you need. This allows to pull out the basic content of pages, or image files, but you may loose much of the more complex data (for example an event page may not have all of its datetime data included) and you will loose much of of the meta-data.

Here is how someone migrated from Plone to Word press:

http://www.len.ro/2008/10/plone-to-wordpress-migration/

There are a number of articles on migrating from one Plone version to another. Some of this information maybe useful to you. stackoverflow is not allowing me to post more links but search for:

"when the plone migration fails doing content migration only"

"Plone Product ContentMigration"

Answer 3

if its a plone site, you could try contentmirror