Cannot customize print configuration in a Mapstore project

[sguimmara]

Description

I created a Mapstore project with the project generator script (using Mapstore as a submodule). When I try to customize the path to the print configuration using the option -Dmapfish-print-config=/path/to/config.yaml

npm run be:start -- -Dmapfish-print-config="path/to/print/config.yaml"

The option is ignored and the default path is used instead.

How to reproduce

• Create a Mapstore project with the generator
• Create a custom config.yaml file
• Pass the path to this custom config file to the npm run be:start command:

npm run be:start -- -Dmapfish-print-config="path/to/print/config.yaml"

Expected Result

The custom configuration file is used by the print module.

Current Result

The default configuration file is used by the print module.

• Not browser related

Browser info

(use this site: https://www.whatsmybrowser.org/ for non expert users)

Browser Affected	Version
Internet Explorer
Edge
Chrome
Firefox
Safari

Other useful information

[tdipisa]

@Binabh Can you please double check? Are you able to reproduce this?

[Binabh]

This issue exists and I was able to reproduce this.

The docs here mentions about

-Dmapfish-print-config=/etc/mapstore/datadir/printing/config.yaml

but it does not work like that. I confirmed with

curl -sS http://localhost:8080/mapstore/pdf/info.json

Here layouts mentioned in my custom configs are not showing. Default is being used instead.
But when passed like

npm run be:start -- \
    -Dbackend.debug.args="-Dmapfish-print-config=/etc/mapstore/datadir/printing/config.yaml"

It works. Again confirmed with

curl -sS http://localhost:8080/mapstore/pdf/info.json

Here layouts mentioned in custom configs showed up.
So, the problem seems like the args are not correctly forwarded by cargo.

I see two ways to solve this:

1. Change code to properly forward params.
2. Change docs to mention -Dbackend.debug.args=

Which path should we go @tdipisa @offtherailz ?

[offtherailz]

The command referred is intended to be lunched in production envrionment, not in development mode. So it can not be used in npm run:be -- -D... (and the documentation do not mention this command in fact). In dev mode the finding of @Binabh is correct, but most of the times, you don't need to configure this. This is the case you have to load the config at runtime.

The documentation mentions that MapStore by default gets it from the /printing folder in the root of the generated project.
If you have a custom project, most of the time you want simply to configure one printing config for the project, that is used all of the times, and deployed with the application itself.
One way to do that is to change your web/pom.xml this way:

<resources>
    <resource>
-        <directory>${basedir}/../MapStore2/java/printing/resources/geoserver/print</directory>
+        <directory>${basedir}/printing</directory>
        <includes><include>*</include></includes>
    </resource>
</resources>

and include your customizations in a /printing directory in your project.

We can so improve the doc to include this solution, that has not been explicitely mentioned in the doc, I see it is too implicit.
We can also find alternative strategies for making this easier in the future.