Delaying legacy RCAT upload to Riverscapes Warehouse

[MattReimer]

This is a catch-all ticket for a few different issues.

• Will not take much to make RCAT RAVE compliant #24
• pyRCAT Curation  RiverscapesXML#217
• RCA QRAVE Curation  RiverscapesXML#202
• RCA XSD Fix RiverscapesXML#234
• Updated pyRCAT Business Logic RiverscapesXML#268

In discussing this with @Cashe93 we determined there were some problems with the legacy RCAT project xmls that prevent them from being uploaded into the warehouse and/or used in RAVE products. This does not mean that the projects are broken in any other sense. In fact, they are all usable as-is in ESRI because they come packaged with .lyr files.

Problems

Here are a few of the problems we came up with:

• Project XMLs don't use the right XSD
• Project XMLs don't validate once the XSD path is corrected
• Project XMLs have lots of missing layers: i.e. layers that are in the file system but not in the project xml.
• There are multiple versions of RCA out there. Some of them have just RCA, others have Confinement, RVD etc as well.
• The projects that have RVD, Confinement and bankfull channel only list RCA files in their project.rs.xml files.

The last three points there are the big ones. It is unreasonable to ask a human to correct these project xmls as it is time consuming and too easy to make mistakes that cause unreasonable amounts of pain and effort down the pipe. I've said it before: humans should not hand-write XML. The better way to do this is to write a little bit of python code:

Need a python script that can:

1. Scrape a folder and look for projects to fix.
2. Open individual projects and fix any XML problems
3. Add layers by testing a dictionary of known types of layers against files that actually exist
4. Validate the XML and throw good errors if there are problems.

In discussing this with @joewheaton we determined that getting these legacy projects into the warehouse is not the easy task we assumed so we are going to shelve this activity for now.

Feel free to correct me here if I've gotten anything wrong. This shouldn't affect any other deliverables in regards to running legacy RCAT for now.

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FYI @philipbaileynar, @joewheaton, @wally-mac, @Cashe93, @MattReimer

[joewheaton]

Thanks @MattReimer for this synopsis. @Cashe93 and @wally-mac I propose we punt this for now until we have a specific project with funding for this task. For the MHFD and Klamath USFWS projects, they did not pay for this Riverscapes-Compliance refactoring of the old or upgrades. As such, we can just provide the non-compliant old pyRCAT outputs (they still work good in ArcGIS) and leave it at that. We will just keep this discussion open as our reminder when we pick it up again.