I was helping someone restore a dump on Windows yesterday on IRC and the Restore button stayed disabled. I'd never had
thatproblem before so I quickly created a new database, dumped it, and tried to restore it. I, too, got the disabled
Restorebutton.<br /><br />Nothing I tried worked so I went into the source code to see what was up and saw the test for
customformat. I checked my test dump and indeed it was plain.<br /><br />I don't know if you've ever tried to restore
adump through psql on the Windows command line but it's not easy, especially if you have non-ascii data. I propose a
coupledifferent solutions to make this situation better:<br /><br />1- Don't disable the Restore button[1] or provide
anothermeans of letting the user know why restoration is not possible.<br />2- Automatically use psql when a plain dump
isencountered. Guillaume Lelarge says the project doesn't want to package psql to avoid bloat. That's fine, but its
presencecan be tested for in "PG bin path" and used if found.<br /> 3- Make "custom" the default option when dumping.
Fora know-nothing newbie, dumping using the default options and immediately restoring using the default options should
JustWork. Today it doesn't.<br />4- Allow pgAdmin to stream a file to the server. COPY can do this but I haven't
lookedinto how exactly. This avoids having to open the plain dump in the sql editor which for any reasonably sized
databasewill take forever and then die horribly (I've tried it).<br /><br /><br />[1] <a
href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/07/01.html">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/07/01.html</a><br/>