Compatible with latest versions of django and py-odbc-azure

[singhravi1]

Hello everyone,

I would like to know how could we make this package to be compatible with the latest django version?
I would like to contribute to this package if possible.

Thanks

[markhepburn]

Hi @singhravi1 , thanks for your interest.

I'd absolutely welcome this -- I'd love to see it happen, but I haven't had the personal time to work on it, and we haven't managed to find the funding opportunity to do it in work time. I believe the geodjango backend had a fairly significant refactor so I suspect there would be some non-trivial work involved.

Definitely if you make any progress though I'd love to see it and happy to possibly work with you on it.

[singhravi1]

@n2ygk Can you help us?

[n2ygk]

@singhravi1 not sure what you are asking of me.

I do note that we found problems with freetds which I see in the setup documentation and instead use the standard microsoft odbc client library....

          'OPTIONS': {
                'driver': 'ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server',
            },

The freetds error had something to do with binary fields, throwing this error:

DataError: ('22018', '[22018] [FreeTDS][SQL Server]Implicit conversion from data type varchar to varbinary(max) is not allowed. Use the CONVERT function to run this query. (257) (SQLExecDirectW)') 

[singhravi1]

@n2ygk I would like to get this project working again. Can you guide me where should i start and probably work with me for achieving it?

[n2ygk]

I guess start with django's contrib GIS code and to see what's changed between 1.8 and 2.1 in the Release Notes For example: the 1.9 release notes document significant changes to django.contrib.gis. Likewise also for 1.10, 1.11, 2.0, and 2.1.

Probably a good approach is to see how the "supported" GIS backends have morphed since 1.8. Maybe start by looking at commit history for one like mysql relative to the 1.8 tag vs. the latest 1.11.17 and also against master or 2.1.4, the reason being that 1.11 is under long term support (LTS) and 2.1 is current.

mysql$ pwd
/Users/ac45/src/django/django/contrib/gis/db/backends/mysql
mysql$ git diff 1.8 1.11.17 . | wc -l
     229
mysql$ git diff 1.8 . | wc -l
     323

[singhravi1]

That DOES seem a lot of effort! 😅

[n2ygk]

If you must use SQL Server and you want django.contrib.gis support then you have to do the work. Otherwise, stick with one of the several supported GIS database backends. Or, hope that somehow SQL Server gets added to the supported list.

[singhravi1]

Absolutely correct.
For now, i only need distance function. So, i'm writing custom field and custom lookup for that.

Should i consider writing raw queries?