Changing your packagename

Use Plone for several years and you will always find some product you made years ago and still frequently use today.

Now I recently had such a product, it was called Products.MyClientAdres. The name was reffering to some client but had nothing to do with it anymore. It was used in a completley different site but still used the same old svn location and package name.

My new package

When decided to change the name, I just blindly copied the product, renamed all the MyClientAdres things to my new package name 'fourdigits.organisations' and put everything in my buildout.

The result was very easy to predict, all my objects where broken after deleting the old product from the instance. They where all looking for Products.MyClientAdres.content.organisations but that was gone.

Convert the objects

To get my products back alive we need to change the class of every object we made with the old product. First thing to keep in mind, keep both you old and new product installed in your instance because you cannot call a broken object!

Make a script to convert all the class to you new class. Get the new class name from you package, here its called Adressenbank and Organisatie.

from fourdigits.organisations.content.Adressenbank import Adressenbank
from fourdigits.organisations.content.Organisatie import Organisatie

Convert the old adressenbank folder to the new Adressenbank contenttype from my new package.

adressenbank = getSite().unrestrictedTraverse('adressenbank')
tmp = Adressenbank(self.context)
adressenbank.__class__ =  tmp.__class__

Convert the +3000 organisations still in the folder above.

ct = getToolByName(self, 'portal_catalog')
query = {}
query['object_provides'] = 'Products.MyClientAdres.content.interfaces.IOrganisatie'
results = ct(query)
tmp = Organisatie(self.context)

for result in results:
    obj = result.getObject()
    obj.__class__ =  tmp.__class__

transaction.commit()

Rebuild the catalog by hand after your finished running the script.

Restart you instance and use quickingstaller to uninstalled your old product. Restart again and smile, all your object are working using your new product.