If the use-case of migrating packages through the 
environments holds true I'd expect the meta-data associated with packages to 
remain constant.
 
Perhaps I've made an assumption that you don't have 
categories called "Production rules", "QA rules" etc.
 
Thinking wider; is there a requirement to allow 
export\import to be sliced and diced many different ways:-
  
  well for category things - it could be that if a category doesn't 
  exist in the target "space" then it is created, if not, it is used. There are 
  other things though, which are interlinked - but the same issue you bring up 
  applies (which is why this wasn't done a while back). 
  
  So a simple JCR partial export won't really do - needs to be a bit more 
  programmatic than that. 
  
  The question is - in the target space - do we want to create the missing 
  things, or remove the links from them as part of the export etc... 
  
  So if RuleA depends on categoryX and categoryY, but only categoryX (same 
  name) exists in the target place, then do we create categoryY there, or strip 
  it? 
  On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Jervis Liu 
<jliu@redhat.com> 
  wrote:
  
Hi,
I 
    am currently evaluating a Guvnor feature request which is to 
    implement
package based import/export. The idea is to use this feature to 
    move a
rule package from the DEV repo to QA to Stage to the Prod repo. 
    For
details please check https://jira.jboss.org/browse/GUVNOR-311. My
initial 
    investigation shows that it is not possible to do a single
package 
    import/export technically. A single package in Guvnor repository
is never 
    a self-contained unit. For example, every asset under the
package has a 
    mandatory attribute which is a reference link to category
information. In 
    short, package can not be exported/imported as long as
it contains 
    references to entities outside package.
There are two things I would 
    like to ask for your opinions. Firstly, can
you think of any way to 
    implement this import/export feature? Personally
I dont see how this can 
    be done. This is similar to relational database,
generally it is 
    impossible to export and import data from/to a single
non-isolated table 
    in database. Or sometimes it is possible but with
extensive care normally 
    involved in manual work to deal with dirty data.
In our case, one example 
    of dirty data is category, but what can we do
with category information, 
    we discard package information when we do
package 
    export?
Secondly, if such feature can not be implemented, can we 
    figure out a
different way to help users to better manage the life cycle 
    in Guvnor?
The current version of Guvnor is not very strong on this part 
    yet. If
you are a Guvnor user or you have experience of using similar 
    products,
how did you manage and how do you want to manage the lifecycle 
    of assets
in your 
    repository?
Thanks,
Jervis
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Michael D Neale
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