Iguana 6 Channel Importer

This is something we are building out incrementally with customers migrating to Iguana X. It’s evolving and proving very helpful in helping us figure out how we can streamline the conversion process through finding the key use case patterns and how they can be brought over in a smooth and safe fashion.

Reminder: Reach out to work with us - support@interfaceware.com. We’ve successfully helped a few customers use the converter. It’s been extremely helpful in quickly identifying issues we need to address to help them port over.

Click the Iguana 6 Channel Importer and ADD.

You can test with the default repo included in the component OR you can import your own channels by using your own repository with Iguana 6.1 channels exported! See Migration Preparation for how to export your channels to your own repository.

Edit the GitRepo custom field with your Git repository link. Click the check mark to save your change.

Tip! To get your git repository link from Bitbucket, click clone and copy the SSH link provided.

It should generate and link a number of components corresponding to the channels in the repository.

All components imported with contain the #imported tag. Use this to filter your dashboard and view all imported components.

Note: If the Importer is erroring with the message below it may be due to the repository privacy settings changing from public to private. To remediate the issue, refresh your Git Cache, wait for the refresh to complete, then rerun the Importer component.

Stopping component with runtime error:
main.lua:18: Could not create _bitbucket-org:test-iguana6channels-git. fatal: could not read Username for 'https://bitbucket.org': terminal prompts disabled
Git url: git@bitbucket.org:test/iguana6channels.git

Inside the Channel Importer Tool:

You can see clearly how the channel structure is converted into IguanaX components in the CHAN library.

Go have a look at CHAN/CHANllpSource.lua. This code has the mapping of configuration information from Iguana 6 into IguanaX.

The shim module in the CHAN library allows us to simulate API functions which don’t exist under IguanaX that used to be under Iguana 6.

This includes things like iguana.channelName() which don’t make sense for IguanaX which no longer has channels. See Shim functions.

Since the shim module is designed to be a temporary solution during your migration, what are some strategies to deal with the missing obsolete Iguana 6 APIs in your new IguanaX environment?

Our team is experimenting with streamlining this with A library to recreate Iguana 6 APIs for easier porting of code.

The Channel Importer tool uses our vmd_tool to convert legacy VMDs to an XML format IguanaX can ingest. If you are migrating any Iguana v6 legacy channels that use VMDs, you’ll need to ensure you have the Iguana 6.1.5 installed on the server as the vmd_tool is packaged within.

See How to convert legacy Python Based VMD channels.

We are optimistic we can automate most of the work in converting Iguana 6 to IguanaX code. Doing the conversion in this way is very powerful since it will give final control to each customer to go the last mile in terms of doing the conversion in manner which helps you each get the best conversion possible.

It makes it possible to customize the script to target specific problems that might only have an impact on your use cases of Iguana.

For now we are working with a number of customers to use this tool to accelerate the process of identifying and eliminating gaps and making IguanaX a practical platform to migrate to.

Scaling out channel conversion.