openmrs installation wizard: if you had a wish what would it be?

Development
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Hi there!

I am on a quest to update our dependencies in openmrs-core. While at it, I found that our installation wizard depends on an old version of the template engine apache-velocity. I then thought I’d like to test the templates and its supporting classes/servlet filters while upgrading but I am unsure if thats possible (lots of static methods, possible cyclic dependencies, …). Also our jquery version is very old, which is unnoticed since we do not have a proper JavaScript build tool chain in use for the wizard.

Then I thought, what would you wish for? What are the things you struggle with, with the current wizard and would like to be different?

I’m sure I’ll find a way to update to the 2.0 velocity https://github.com/apache/velocity-engine but thought it might be a good point to ask if a different approach would benefit the community more.

Happy to hear your thoughts!

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Since you asked this under the developer category, i will also talk about a developer wish. :slight_smile: It would be great if the installation wizard boots spring on startup.

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I really like that you’re asking the bigger question about how we actually want the installation wizard to work, instead of blindly just trying to update dependencies.

Honestly I have never tried to touch the current wizard because I assume that it’s inflexible, and in an awkward technology.

Going forward it would be nice if different OpenMRS distributions can leverage the core installation wizard by plugging in additional screens and actions. (I don’t know if they’d do this with modules or what.)

This doesn’t seem right to me. I would expect that the install/upgrade wizard just runs in a shell environment, and does not have all the API and modules loaded up…