Migration issues for Templates and Pages

Hi. I am trying to migrate from 3.7 to 4.3.
I tried migrating templates and pages. None of my templates came over. This my log when I try to migrate templates:

"Getting content counts...
Importing 19 template(s)...
Error retrieving template: Value cannot be null.\u000d\u000aParameter name: virtualPath at System.Web.VirtualPath.Create(String virtualPath, VirtualPathOptions options)\u000d\u000a at Telerik.Sitefinity.Migration.MigrationService.GetUserControls(String fileContent, List`1 userControlsList)\u000d\u000a at Telerik.Sitefinity.Migration.MigrationService.GetMasterPages(String masterPagePath, List`1 masterPagesList, MigrationMasterPageStatus isPrimary)\u000d\u000a at Telerik.Sitefinity.Migration.MigrationService.GetSingleTemplate(Message templateDefinitionParam)\u000d\u000a at SyncInvokeGetSingleTemplate(Object , Object[] , Object[] )\u000d\u000a at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.SyncMethodInvoker.Invoke(Object instance, Object[] inputs, Object[]& outputs)\u000d\u000a at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperationRuntime.InvokeBegin(MessageRpc& rpc)\u000d\u000a at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage5(MessageRpc& rpc)\u000d\u000a at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableDispatchRuntime.ProcessMessage31(MessageRpc& rpc)\u000d\u000a at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.MessageRpc.Process(Boolean isOperationContextSet)
Performing post migration actions...
Rewriting template URLs... done
Migration complete.


For pages, it says they all came over, however, only the pages at the top level of my 3.7 site appear in the pages list in the 4.3 admin. No sub pages appear at all. 

Hello Robert,

If your templates are based on masterpages, they need to be re-created manually on the new site, as they are not content item that is being migrated.

The following blog posts may be useful to you:

http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/joshmorales/posts/11-11-22/migrating_sitefinity_3_to_4_deep_dive_preparation.aspx

http://www.sitefinity.com/blogs/slavoingilizov/posts/11-04-18/taking_advantage_of_the_virtual_path_provider_in_sitefinity_4_1.aspx

All the best,
Victor Velev
the Telerik team

Hi Robert,

If it is not that urgent for your I'd suggest to wait for the build that we'll be releasing this week - it fixes a lot of issues related to the migration of master pages and templates. Also we'll add support for migration of more than 16 new widgets compared to the previous build.

All the best,
Pavel Iliev
the Telerik team

Sounds good. I'll wait!

This still doesn't work in the 12/2 release. It completely sucks. Templates are hosed, image links are broken, and standard controls are broken. We're forced to rebuild each page by hand. Leaves us wondering if we should've waited until version 5.1 - or move to Kentico?

Marty, I'm sorry you're still having issues with the migration tool. Are you receiving the same error messages that Robert reported in his initial post?

I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to take a closer look at your site and migration and see if this is something that we can either resolve or provide feedback to the migration development team.

Please feel free to email me at josh.morales at telerik com and I'll do what I can to help, thanks!

Hi Selaromdotnet,

We really need more details about the problems which the customer experience. I hope that he will send us his project. The problem with images could be that he didn't configure the libraries root path.

All the best,
Lilia Messechkova
the Telerik team

I checked with my developers and they were using 4.3.1825, not the latest internal build (which wasn't recommended for production purposes). With the release of Sitefinity 4.4 and the migration tool 4.4.2117.0, things are much better. It looks like templates, content and images came over fine. Now we're rebuilding custom controls.

My developer added the following. He took an alternative approach to the import process, first imported users, content, images, lists, news etc. then imported the themes. After the themes he imported the templates, that took some tweaking but finally was able to get them over. The final import was the pages. This process seems to have been the best migration to date. Our custom controls will probably always be the trouble with the migration, but 4.4 looks to have made the migration a lot better.

It looks like I forgot to knock on wood. The page count for the 3.7 site was over 300 pages. Only 136 came over. We counted using this script:
'List<PageNode> _PageList = App.WorkWith()
            .Pages()
            .LocatedIn(Telerik.Sitefinity.Fluent.Pages.PageLocation.Frontend)
            .Get()
            .ToList();'

Hello Marty,

Can you please zip the "Log" folder located in "..\App_Data\Sitefinity" and send it to use so we can check for errors logged during the migration. Can you also check how many pages do you have in your pages grid, just to make sure that the API returns the same value.

Note: The migration tool migrates only published pages.

Greetings,
Lilia Messechkova
the Telerik team

So I waited for the 4.4 release and now I cannot even connect to my 3.7 site from 4.4. I am entering my username and password that it asks for in the migration interface on the 4.4 site and it tells me that it cannot connect to that 3.7 site. 

I was running my 3.7 site from the project manager which runs it as a virtual directory. I switched it to  run from IIS and I was able to connect.