Legacy applications within Drtupal 7 site

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GlenRanson's picture

Hi

We are working on upgrading an existing Drupal 6 govt site to Drupal 7. One of the potential show stoppers we have come across is how to display and use a bunch of legacy .Net applications within our new D7 site. Currently the applications are wrapped with the fantastic but complex Wrapper module(https://drupal.org/project/wrapper) which is sadly not compatible with D7 (only D6).
We have looked into other non-Drupal ways to do this but come up with more issues than solutions...like; iframes.
One short term solution that was suggested was to use a D6 version with only the wrapper and use the D7 version site to talk to the wrapped applications, but as D6 will no longer be supported after release of D8 this may not fly with the client.
Firstly we would like to know if anyone out there has had this issue before and how to get around it???

We cant Drupalise the legacy applications at this stage as there is too many and this would definitely need to be a separate line of work.

Thanks

Comments

working with legacy data

klanahan's picture

There are a couple of options you can do. I'll assume that the .NET apps are providing dynamic info to Drupal.

1) If you have access to the data tables and have a .NET programmer, why not create a web service to provide the data to Drupal? You can do most of your configuration in Views at that point.
2) If you have access to the data tables, you could also schedule regular exports to a Drupal table and write a custom module to display the data.
3) If you don't have access to the data sources, or the client won't update the code, go with your short-term option. It may not be optimal, but at least it will work until you can go with option 1 or 2.

Good luck!

Thanks Yeah we had a feeling

GlenRanson's picture

Thanks

Yeah we had a feeling that was probably the way forward. I guess the wrapper was a fix to fix legacy apps in the first place, now we have the issue of creating a fix to fix the fix!

I think you'd be spending

greggles's picture

I think you'd be spending more time making the D6 site "locked down" than you would just porting the Wrapper module to Drupal 7. Have you tried posting to the issue queue of the module asking about a d7 releases or offering to pay to have it upgraded?

There is http://drupal.org/project/lts and https://groups.drupal.org/drupal-lts though it's worth noting that with basically every release of Drupal people propose this idea and it then loses steam around 6 months to a year after the official EOL announcement.

Drupal4Gov

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