Content Porter got you down, friend? You’ve got components from a lower environment that need to be migrated to a staging or production environment, but the schema they’re based on has changes that aren’t ready for prime time yet. It’s 1 am, and if you don’t get this solved by the start of business the sky will fall. Panic! Don’t panic. This has a very simple solution.
An SDL Tridion schema is the (.xsd) definition for content. Eventually you may need to re-order, add, or remove fields to accommodate changes to your content model. Changing a schema doesn’t instantly change content based on this schema (trust me, you probably wouldn’t want it to). To make such an update, authors can open and close items in the Content Manager Explorer which will synchronize components to their updated definitions.
This works for a few dozen items, but can quickly get monotonous for several hundred components. Per SDL Live Content (http://sdllivecontent.sdl.com/), SDL Content Porter 2009 and later have the ability to “Synchronize Components against Schema before importing.”
“If you import a Component or a content item that has metadata, without also importing the (Metadata) Schema on which the item depends, the item you import may not match the Schema on the target system. Selecting this option tells Content Porter to attempt to modify the import item to match the Schema found on the target system.”
There’s a very important note that “selecting this option could lead to data loss.”
This synchronization option covers field re-ordering, removing fields no longer in the target schema(s), and adding new fields as long as they’re optional and/or have a default value. Also important is realizing this is a synchronization action which makes some existing fields match an updated schema. It should be clear that things like renaming fields and requiring a field without a default would require more manual (or programmatic) work.
The option is selected by default on an import, all you have to do is update the target schema before doing the import. Again, be careful with this as schema changes can lead to data loss.
“Synchronize content against Schema before importing” is selected for you during imports
I was fortunate to have a preview version the up and coming 2013 release of SDL Tridion to play with. One new feature is Bundles, which is basically a new type of organizational item, which allows you to group together related items, and do operations on them as a whole. Typically this would be putting it through workflow, or publishing them all together in a single transaction, but one nice thing about them is that you can use them however you want to, just add items into a bundle, and use it however you need to.
The new release of Content Porter will also be bundle-aware, which got me thinking that there should be an easy way to keep track of changed items during development using bundles to avoid the pain of keeping track manually. It turns out to be really easy using the Event System.