Migrating custom user controls

I'm migrating a rather large v3.7 site to v5.4. The site has about a dozen custom user controls and they are used on close to 100 pages! After updating a few of the user controls to work with the new SF api, the pages that use them work again...but I've discovered that NONE of the controls' configuratons were transferred (i.e. the properties in the designers). So now it looks like I have to manually reconfigure every user control on every page. This can't be right!

I found this blog post regarding migrating user controls, but it's scant on details. Before I spend hours writing custom widget builder classes for every control, can someone verify that this will transfer the page-embedded controls' settings? Also, does it automatically add the new widgets to the toolbox or do I need to do that before the migration?

Hi Kent,

We have answered you in the support ticket, but you can share the information from the service request with the community as well.

Kind regards,
Victor Velev
the Telerik team

Thanks Victor.

Here was Telerik's response:

"Unfortunately at the moment the migration module does not handle automatically the persistence of any user-control specific settings of the user controls. Therefore I have logged a feature request in PITS, which you can vote for and track.

I also want to note that by default the migration module supports migrating only Sitefinity content from 3.7 to 4.x / 5.x - custom modules, controls and other logic needs to be re-created once again, using the new API, as the new version of the CMS has a very different architecture and structure in regards to 3.7. However, there are large number of controls new functionality introduced, which might cover some of the scenarios, for which you have previously built custom user controls. For registering and creating new types of controls, you can use our tool - Sitefinity Thunder."


My thought on this is best described by somebody else's comment on that PITS linked to above:
"This should have been in the migration tool all along.  Lack of this functionality is a bug, if you ask me.  Migration tool should MIGRATE the content, along with property values for built-in controls as well as for custom user controls.  If I made even a simple user control but I placed it on 20 pages in version 3.7, I will then have to manually update all 20 instances of this user control after migrating???  It's one thing that the migration tool doesn't "migrate" the custom logic in my user controls.  That's OK.  But the property VALUES should be migrated."

Hi Kent,

Thank you for sharing the response with the community. I hope that it will be useful to others as well.

All the best,
Victor Velev
the Telerik team

Hi ,
    I am not able to migrate usercontrol from sitefinity 3.4 to 5.7 . Also getting error when i am trying to migrate template . So what is the process to migrate template and user controls.

with regards,
Sushil Parkar

Hi Sushil,

As you can see in the post above, migration module of Sitefinity does not support migration of user controls. Complete information about migration process, guidelines, troubleshooting, etc. you can find in the Migration Guide.

For example in the one of Josh Morales' posts you can see the most common errors during migration:

http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/joshmorales/posts/josh-morales-blog/2011/11/29/migrating_sitefinity_3_to_4_deep_dive_common_error_messages

Hope this will help you achieve your goal. 
 
Regards,
Boyko Nistorov
Telerik