Kentico CMS Import Toolkit 5.5R2 Alpha 2

   —   
We have spent a significant amount of time, tweaking the Import Toolkit utility to cover your feedback, and finally, here it is ...
Hi there,

I am happy to announce that the next preview version of our Import Toolkit is ready for you. I apologize to those that expected it during the last week. We have just been too busy preparing the Kentico UK Connection conference so we couldn't make it sooner.

This particular version targets Kentico CMS 5.5 R2 and is shipped as an installation package that will be installed to your standard Kentico installation folder.

If you are new to this topic, here is my previous article about the Import Toolkit:

http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Martin-Hejtmanek/July-2010/Kentico-CMS-5-5-Import-Toolkit.aspx

You can download the new version here:

Kentico CMS Import Toolkit 5.5 R2 (3.1 MB)

What is new?

First of all, any previous bugs reported by you should be fixed. In case you would experience some of them again, please try to provide us with as many details as you can.

New input formats and sources

The new version now supports additional formats of input data:
  • Excel files - supported formats are xlsx, xlsm
  • CSV files - with any character or string as a separator
  • Better support for XML files - you can now also pick up attributes of item nodes as additional columns (this is especially useful for importing from resx files). Also, only content is extracted from CDATA sections.




You now also have the option to read input directly from a web source by typing in the URL of the resource instead of a file path, such as:

http://your.domain.com/CMSPages/BlogRss.aspx




Things that are handled better

There are also some smaller improvements that should make your life easier:
  • Better and more robust error handling in case of inconsistent source data
  • Ability to handle column names in invalid format
  • Handling of too long input data (larger than destination field)
I hope you will enjoy it and as always, any feedback is appreciated.

See you next time ...
Share this article on   LinkedIn

Martin Hejtmanek

Hi, I am the CTO of Kentico and I will be constantly providing you the information about current development process and other interesting technical things you might want to know about Kentico.

Comments

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

No, it is completely different, Import toolkit is a WinForms application, see this: http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/6_0/devguide/index.html?import_toolkit_initial_steps.htm

In case you have some problems with migration of the data through export/import in site manager, please contact support with some more details.

aezzell-gpworldwide commented on

Is it different from the standard "Import site or objects" link that's on the Site Manager / Sites tab?

Because that's not working for me. I'm trying to import some products from another v6 site - the documents come in, but they don't come in as products.

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Sure, it is part of the default installation

aezzell-gpworldwide commented on

Do you have a version of this for Kentico version 6 (SP1)?

chrishaff-gmail commented on

Looks like I was indeed missing something, the "Show Advanced Columns" checkbox in the upper right corner of Step 6.

chrishaff-gmail commented on

I can't seem to import into DocumentContent? It just never shows up as an option no matter what Document type I choose. Is that right or am I missing something?

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Prabodh,

You can bulk-publish the documents from the listing mode in CMSDesk -> Content. That should do the work.

I think we can add the option to automatically publish imported documents to the Toolkit, I will just need to verify with our guys there is still time for it.

Prabodh commented on

I tried importing Blog Pots with this tool. However, I found those are not published by default. It this how it works?

I have to import over 6k posts, and it would be very painful for me to publich each post.

Is there a workaround? Can I do it from backend?

Armysniper89(2) commented on

I sent them to support because I found that you could simulate creating my users just fine but when you tried to do the actual import it would stop half way through and say it is done. They are looking into it. On a note though, I did get 26k users imported as global users. Is there a way to add to the import toolkit when importing a user the ability to assign them to sites. I would like to assign them to both of our sites not just one or none as the case is now.

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi,

Sure will. And if you have some spare time doing that, it would be great to provide some import profiles for migrating data from those system to our Market place ;-)

For now, the last remaining thing we want to cover to 6.0 release (unless there is some more feedback on other missing features) is the ability to update the existing objects, not import just new ones.

Armysniper89 commented on

Great tool Martin! I have been waiting to use this tool since I heard about it last July and now that we are migrating all of our sites to Kentico, I get to dable with it. So far the experience has been great in importing content from Ektron. Site Finity will be next. Please consider me for any betas as I will be doing dry runs of importing until we actually make it go live later this year. Keep up the good work!

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi Lance,

I had to cut your message since it was too long, next time please send this to our support.

You should be able to just type =value into the field to put default value to it, but I agree that we could prefill that with default values from particular table. We will look at that.

Lance commented on

Hi Martin,
Thanks for the tool, it's really needed when moving data from another system into Kentico.

I'm doing a User import from another sql server database and have a feature request - on the column mapping form (step 6), when there is a 'required' mapping - such as the 'UserPassword' or 'UserEnabled' field, it would be good to leave the source field empty and just put in a default value that would be used instead. This is for the scenarios where the source database doesn't have a suitable field for mapping.

Also I have an exception report for when I was trying to import Users - it occurs a few times during the import.

Brian McKeiver commented on

These are some great improvements. Especially the xls and csv file types.

Jeroen Fürst commented on

Thanks Martin!