8.14-RC Make it possible to switch between Media Picker 2 and Media Picker 3

[konius]

Which Umbraco version are you using?

8.14.0-rc

Bug summary

Switching Media Picker 2 to Media Picker 3 looses the current image selection due to data schema differences.

Specifics

No response

Steps to reproduce

1. Create property for Media Picker 2 and pick media items (can be skipped if upgrading)
2. Change property data type to Media Picker 3
3. Navigate back to node with property
4. Selection is gone

Expected result / actual result

I was expecting the currently stored data (comma separated UDI's) to be transformed to the new array of objects with keys.

[nul800sebastiaan]

Thanks @konius, unfortunately, like with many other datatypes, we don't support switching between datatypes that need to have a different schema stored.
Specifically, we don't want to make this a migration either since we don't know the size of the sites we'll be dealing with and how much data is stored in it. So for performance reasons we don't want to do this automatically when upgrading. For now, you would be able to write a migration yourself to find all existing nodes with stored data and convert them to the new format, after which you can switch the data type on the related doctypes.

The other thing I can think of is doing a conversion when each media picker is loaded in Umbraco, the datatype would take the invalid format, update it and show you the picked items, then you can progressively save the new data. This comes with the handicap that you will need to test for this in your razor templates, so you would have to implement two code paths in your template.

In any case, we don't plan to work on this for the initial release at the moment, so for now that would have to be a custom converter.