Sitefinity Content Import

Introduction

Content migration can be a real hassle. When dealing with structured content, you have to go through each row of the exported data, copying and pasting everything manually into the appropriate form for that type of content. And of course, you need to review it before making it live.

Talking about Sitefinity CMS, the way content is organized – like custom content types or dynamic modules – involves some pretty complicated connections between lots of different tables.

Most of the time, we are forced to do the manual copy and paste for the sake of migrating the content.

Fortunate that we figure out how the tables in the database relate to each other. We also have written some scripts to help bring in data from Excel forms.

The Goal

Efficiently bring the Excel content into the database as a draft, allowing the user to conduct another round of review on the migrated content before it's officially published.

The Finding: Table Relationship

The relationship when we publish a content:

• <generated_content_type_table> - 3 raw records are created, with base_id as PK
• sf_dynamic_content - a table to tell the dynamic content state - 3 records are created with different status and versions, with base_id as FK
• sf_language_data - a linking table between dynamic content and its language - 3 records are created with base_id and id as linking key
• sf_dynmc_cntnt_sf_lnguage_data - a table to tell language version - 3 records are created with id as FK

From the finding, we aware that, when you publish a content, it will create 3 records - versions for master, temp and published.

Pre-requisite

• Understanding of Sitefinity CMS
• Understanding of dynamic module / custom content type
• Basic understanding of SQL script
• Basic knowledge of excel

Summary

1. Create a custom content type with the structure that map to previous dataset.
2. Build the script that will insert records to 4 relevant tables:
   • <generated_content_type_table>
   • sf_dynamic_content
   • sf_language_data
   • sf_dynmc_cntnt_sf_lnguage_data
3. You can reuse the excel uploaded here
   • AutoScriptGenerator.xlsx
   • sample_script.sql
4. Execute the SQL script, make sure all scripts are executed without error.
5. Restart the Sitefinity instance
6. Review the actual content and publish.

Some Readings

• Sitefinity - Content Lifecycle
• Haw Jeh - Blogs - Sitefinity Table Structure