the list export/import feature is extremely useful. however, it does not seem to export all the metadata for those lists. it mostly misses validation related information. this would be a minor inconvenience except that labkey does not let you set a field as 'required' once data already exists in a table. this means that when you re-import, because it makes the list and imports data you're stuck. is there a way to force a field to be required once data is in it? all existing rows have values for this field.

workarounds might include deleting all the records, changing the fields to 'required', then re-importing, but that kinda defeats the point of using the import/export mechanism. i will also look into whether i can manually edit the list.xml file produced by the list export to fill in any metadata missed by the list export.