Migration Tool

Hi,

Beta testing the migration tool and have managed to compile and configure both applications that loads the service for 3.7 sp4 and the jobs module loads in beta2.

I first checked all imports to see what happened it errors when importing so tried seperately, have only once managed to successfully import blogs and noted categories and tags associated were not imported.

I feel this is not going to be a straight forward migration and assume the migration tool is also in beta, however it does include some excellent code examples.

Hi

Hi Johar ,

There is an open source tool that you can use.

Sincerely yours,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Hi,

The migration tools seems random for me and works when it wants to only by selecting single import modules, last two efforts resulted in the image library hierachy importing but not the images. The last error and still failing to import pages is below.

Seemed to have alot more success when migrating data to a new project when not using a existing beta project for migration, all modules run but still errors for pages and image libraries contain hierachy but no viewable images that are set at 1px by 1px.

Also looking further at the files that were migrated due to 3.7 project using nested masterpages and version 4 not supporting them is proving problematic.

Looks like it will quicker to migrate manually for me but for webmasters with really large sites Happy Days.

Hello Neil,

Thank you for sharing your feedback in regards with the migration tool.

This tool is at its very early stage of development. It is still an Alpha version and there is a lot to be done. We would be happy if you keep sharing your experience using it as we intend on developing it much further to ease the process of transferring 3.x sites to the new architecture.

There is a problem with importing users and roles right now and we will address this problem. Other than that I was able to transfer the demo.sitefinity.com website to 4.0 Beta 2 (excluding users and roles) all at once. It is important to note that when the tool transfers your master pages and themes you have to spend some time to resolve problems there. For example if you are using controls such as JsFileLink and CssFileLink you have to substitute them with their counterpart in SF 4.0 - the ResourceLinks control. Also I had to manually transfer images that are used in the theme and make sure that their urls resolve properly.

Greetings,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Thanks Radoslav,

Codeplex mentioned alpha and noticed there is a small amount of manual labour involved in relation to css file links and images.

Will be interesting later on in the release cycle when IIS search engine optimisation module is run against the migrated site and in no doubt Sitefinity will have this covered.

Best Regards

Hello Sir,

My current sitefinity version is 3.6. I want to upgrade this to 3.7. Can you suggest me a tool for this ?

Thank You
Roops

Hi Roopesh,

For 3.x you should follow our upgrade instructions.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Hi There,

The migration tool does not work for me. I've downloaded the latest change control set from the codeplex site, compiled the dll and followed the instructions. When I try and invoke the migration I get the following error:

Migration export service exists but timed out.

I then try again and then get this error:

Error: Could not find http://localhost/ButterflyCupcakes/MigrationExportService.svc on the source site.

Yet, when I copy and paste that url into my browser I get the to the service fine. Any config that I have missed?

Regards,
Jean Erasmus

Hi Jean,

It seems that the service call is timing out. Can you please try increase the service call timeout?

Kind regards,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

Hi ,
I experienced the same problem as Neil. It was a result of a page having more than one URL defined.

To fix this problem modify the following code starting on line 944 of the MigrationExportService.cs file from this:

Hi,

There is also another issue with external pages linked to a page within itself originating on these two lines of code:

As assumed for external pages it is trying to find the created page in Sitefinity. I'm not sure how to create external pages just yet but to get the migration tool to work you can just replace the following lines:

Hi S. Webb,

1. We fixed the issue "Unable to cast object of type 'Telerik.Cms.Data.CmsUrl' to type 'System.String'"

2. Sitefinity 4.0 does not support external links and we cannot convert these pages.

Regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Hi There,

No support for external pages in SF 4.0? This new version seems more and more to be lacking basic features and functionality.

Regards,
Jean Erasmus

Hello Jean,

I hope that we will have them after Q1. You can take a look at this post.

My testing of the migration tool has brought me to bring my experience with it by listing some of the issues I'm having here:

1. Selecting to import all seems to do nothing. Importing things in one by one is proving more productive. A progress bar to show something is running I think needed here. When bringing in 600 pages it would be nice to see it's progress or at the very least that it's running at all.

2. Obviously, much more work to be done with regards to the themes and templates being brought in correctly. You may want to let people know in the early stages of this tool that setting up these will be a manual process. (You can avoid questions about the pages not showing up that way.) Even when it brings the pages in, it doesn't associate them with the right templates or themes making it appear the themes, templates and data didn't get imported correctly.

3. When the page import is going on and it comes accross something it doesn't understand like a marketplace control on a page (example: iframe control) the import throws and error and doesn't continue. It would be great if it could skip over those and keep going till it finishes.

4. Widgets that are on pages have their permission automatically set to Admin only view. It appears there is no way to set all widgets to viewible to everyone without going in to each page and changing their permissions one by one. Obviously, when you have a site with 700+ pages and thousands of widget placed on those pages, that a big problem.

5. I have the 4.0 standard installed and it's not allowing me to import more than about 11 pages total. Do I have to license this version? Is it timing out? Not sure, but it will only successfully bring over just 10-11 pages no matter what I do. When I run page migration again it doesn't bring over any more, no matter how long I let it run.

6. It bring in news items great, but not events.

7. It does not appear to bring in any image or document libraries.

Hope this helps. Looking forward to the advancements.

With regards to items #4 and #5 I just posted.

I figured out why it would only import 10-11 pages and not any more, but not throw an error.

What was happening is it encountered an external page. When it does that it doesn't go any farther, but does not throw an error.

By removing the external pages from my site it successfully imported all pages.

I'll be posting my experiences/issues with the Migration Tool here from now on. www.sitefinity.com/.../migration-tool.aspx