/hacks-snipsnap

Exporting SnipSnap data from its XML export file

Primary LanguageCGNU General Public License v2.0GPL-2.0

What are these hacks anyway ?

I used to manage a wiki/blog website using the Snip Snap system for an organization I am involved in. I did not choose this system which was imposed to me due to time constraints (mother of all evils :-). I considered that choice to be a really bad one for differents reasons amongst which memory greediness and very poor documentation of the storage data structure.

Once I was sur that the developpement ceased and after numerous crashes due to memory lack on the hosting computer I decided to change the wiki system to another one much more supported and documented (I first choose Ikiwiki but then write my own system and finally returned to Ikiwiki, for those who are interested). Unfortunately since no good documentation of the content storage structure was available this turns to be a nightmare.

I thus decided to document everything I can and tried to set up some tools enabling one to get ride of this system without losing data stored into it.

None of the code delivered here have been tested since a long time. Use it at your own risks.

How to dump data stored in a SNIP-SNAP system

For the following explanation I consider : DEST=/tmp/snips

  1. Stop the snip-snap system on the host where it works

  2. Remove $HOME/.java/.userPrefs/org/snipsnap/

  3. Fix $HOME/.java/.userPrefs/org/snipsnap/config.prefs.xml using the template from this directory. The important part is the content of $HOME/.java/.userPrefs/org/snipsnap/config/prefs.xml, and in this file what is sensible is the snipsnap.server.webapp.root key.

    In the following example I put the value to be in $DEST.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE map SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/preferences.dtd">
<map MAP_XML_VERSION="1.0">
<entry key="snipsnap.server.admin.password" value="663b9"/>
<entry key="snipsnap.server.admin.rpc.url" value="http://localhost:8574"/>
<entry key="snipsnap.server.encoding" value="UTF-8"/>
<entry key="snipsnap.server.version" value="1.0b3-uttoxeter"/>
<entry key="snipsnap.server.webapp.root" value="/tmp/snips/applications"/>
</map>

  1. Unzip the snipsnap.tgz file into $DEST

  2. Copy the _8668_ directory on the host you are working in $DEST/applications

  3. Fix your JAVA_HOME variable

  4. Call $DEST/run.sh

  5. Login into http://localhost:8668

  6. Export Database in SnipSnap Directory through the web interface

  7. Copy the exported database where you want to work with it. The exported database is the file :

$DEST/applications/_8668_/webapp/WEB-INF/WIKI-DATE.snip`

What is stored in snipspace xml file ?

There are basically 2 kinds of elements :

  • <user> containing :

    • login
    • passwd
    • email
    • roles
    • status
    • cTime
    • mTime
    • lastAccess
    • lastLogin
    • lastLogout
    • application

  • <snip> containing :

    • name
    • oUser
    • cUser
    • mUser
    • cTime
    • mTime
    • permissions
    • backlinks
    • sniplinks
    • labels
    • attachments containing one or one to many each containing :
      • name
      • content-type
      • size
      • date
      • location
      • data (base64 encoded)
    • viewCount
    • content
    • application
    • parentSnip
    • commentSnip

What is available here ?

  • snipexport.c

    A small C program enabling you to export data stored in SnipSnap dump file into many files.

    You need libxml2-dev installed to compile it. As shown in the given makefile, you need to adapt CFLAGS and LDFLAGS to compile it.

  • snipsnap.tgz

    Last released version of Snip-Snap. That should now be available in a repository on github (https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap) but I, however, did not check if it's the same release.