Introducing non-transactional package loading

The next beta of MapGuide Maestro 4.0 will feature a new way of loading packages which I call "non-transactional" package loading.

Normally the package loading process in Maestro is as follows.

1. Select the package file
2. Maestro invokes APPLYRESOURCEPACKAGE on the MapGuide Server and uploads the package file
3. Twiddle your thumbs, because there is no way to know how long this operation will take
4. The operation being transactional means that the operation will wholly suceeed or wholly fail.

Loading a package several hundred MBs in size only to be told that the entire operation failed at the end is needless to say, a very frustrating experience.

Non-transactional package takes a different approach. It eschews using the APPLYRESOURCEPACKAGE API (the cause of the thumb twiddling and waiting because there is no way to track progress) for an approach that allows progress to be measured. At the heart of a MapGuide Package is the resource package manifest, which is simply a list of resource service operations to execute on the MapGuide Server, which are generally a mixture of:

• SETRESOURCE
• SETRESOURCEDATA
• DELETERESOURCE

The existing approach executes all these operations on the server-side under one big transaction, the new approach executes all these operations one at a time from the client side and because we know how many operations need to be executed, we can measure the entire progress of the package loading operation.

Now when you load a package, you will be asked to choose the method of uploading:

Choosing the Transactional method will load the package in the existing fashion. Choosing the other option will use the non-transactional method and because this approach is measurable, we get a nice meaningful progress dialog to relay the upload progress.

So in what cases would you use non-transactional package loading over the default transactional one? Here's a few I've thought of:

• The package file is several hundred MBs in size
• The package file contains hundreds of resources to be loaded
• The package file is not loadable via the transactional method, which is generally the result of any of the above items.

Finally, because it's non-transactional if one operation fails it will keep continuing with the upload of the others, failed operations are logged. As a result, the upload can partially succeed and fail. Should the operation partially fail, it is planned to re-use the list of failed operations to allow you to re-run the package upload, but to skip all the successful operations, thus turning a partially failed upload to a fully successful one.


I've received some test packages which completely failed to load under the official package loading methods. These packages loaded without issues in the non-transactional mode. So no matter low large or small your data packages are, Maestro can upload it for you. One way or another.