Moving folders without breaking links

When one invokes the File --> Move command from the TS GUI, the following shows up: "Warning: Moving files or folders may break existing links." My client wants a mechanism to move files/folders without breaking links. Has anyone developed one?

In addition to what File --> Move already does, I believe the custom Move interface should automatically do all of the following:

* Check whether user is authorized to move items and, if so, whether he has write access to the Destination

* Provide more warnings, e.g., that some users may have browser bookmarks that will break. It may be necessary to update the Web servers to change aliases. It may also be necessary to update the Web-page-not-found error-handling code to redirect to the new location. Ask for confirmation to proceed

* Check whether source folder already exists in Destination. If so, ask user whether to overwrite target. Warn user that, if yes, will lose all that's already in target

* Resolve Modified files that will be affected by the Move. For example, we don't want to move files that are being updated (the user is not all done with them) and publish them automatically. Start by "unmodifying" files that are unnecessarily flagged as Modified.

* Display the source files that are Modified, organized by the user who modified them and the date. Ask the user to get the Modified files resolved (for example, by contacting the people who modified the files), and then terminate program

* Display the Modified files that have "existing links" (to the items being moved), organized by the user who modified them and the date. Ask the user to get the Modified files resolved, and then terminate program

* Display the source files that are attached to a workflow job, organized by the task owner and the date. Ask the user to get the tasks completed, and then terminate program

* Move the source items -- HTML file(s), image(s), etc.

* Move the source DCR(s)

* Update the permissions of the moved content, as necessary

* Change the Extended Attributes of the HTML page(s) to reflect the new location

* Change from "source" string to "Destination" string in all the DCRs with existing links, including the DCRs being moved, which may, for example, have references to images in a source sub-folder

* Regenerate the corresponding HTML pages (in our company, we can determine the vPath of a generated HTML file given the vPath of a DCR)

* Submit/publish the moved items (the newly created items, but not the source items)

* Submit/publish the referring pages (the ones with the links to the moved pages)

* Submit/publish the deletions of the source items

* Provide confirmation to user, and then terminate

Thoughts? Incidentally, we have TS 6.7.2 SP2 and are migrating from Windows to Linux.

Thanks,

S.

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ISCBorisB

My client wants a mechanism to move files/folders without breaking links

Are you sure that you want it too? Forget CMS for a moment. Imagine what amount of automatic changes will be required to do that
in a static HTML Site. You'd have to find and re-link all affected references including scripting (eg, not just anchors).
You'd have to identify and fix indirectly affected Components like Index Pages, Site Maps, etc

It is orders of magnitude worse in CMS. I hope your Branch structure maps your Site. Perhaps you even do partial double-mapping under
Type Data folders, who knows. All that must be rebuilt as well. You would have to do all of the above in multiple places like STAGING,
WAs etc that are never perfectly in synch.

Further, affected Components will have different States. As you've indicated in your post, some of them will have modifications
in progress, some will be attached to Active Workflows, themselves in different Stages within the Flow. Depending on the State,
Components will be Deployed to various Environments like QA, UAT, PreProd, Prod and may need re-Deployments.

Sure, you can "Ask [these] users to get the Modified files resolved, and Ask [that] users to get the tasks completed". All of
a sudden, Menu Item Click becomes a process that should involve and coordinate an activity of many people - and you can not know
upfront who these people are or how much unplanned job you assign to them.

An idea that anybody with the access to "Move Folder" custom menu Item can potentially introduce massive site changes that affect already
approved Content and require full regression test cycle seems dubious to me - to put it mildly

nipper

Are you sure that you want it too? Forget CMS for a moment. Imagine what amount of automatic changes will be required to do that
in a static HTML Site. You'd have to find and re-link all affected references including scripting (eg, not just anchors).
You'd have to identify and fix indirectly affected Components like Index Pages, Site Maps, etc

Yea well he mentioned going from Windows to Linux, the may not have much of a choice. Moving from Windows to Linux will have some links that work in Windows but not on Linux due to case sensitivity.

I did this recently, we went from a pure ASPX model to a hybrid HTML/ASPX model. We also wanted to run both in parallel with the same source (DCR). The site was not overly SEO friendly, so changing the folder structure was pretty much the only way to do it.

Since I use an iw_include to process URLs defined in the DCR, it was easy to remap the old link to the new link. Images were handled the same way. css/js/etc were taken care of when I wrote new PTs. I also did not use the VFE so there are no links in a text block.

So you can do this if you had planned ahead.

me

ISCBorisB

you can do this if you had planned ahead

Andy, I absolutely agree. Sure with the proper planning you can do that - I had to do similar things more than once.
Carefully planned "one time" fix is not what fiquebem was describing though. When I called the approach questionable
what I had in mind was this

In addition to what [...] Move already does, I believe the custom Move interface should automatically do...

fiquebem

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the feedback. While developing our custom Move CGI, I needed code to Browse for and select a file/folder. So (in TS 6.7.2 SP2), I viewed the source of TS's File --> Move function and borrowed the file selection mechanism (/iw-cc/command/iw.teamsite.browse_for_dir). I know, that's not nice and makes it problematic to port to another version of TS.

What else should I use instead of that? I thought I saw a file-selection CGI somewhere on DevNet or the Support site, but there's hardly anything at https://support.interwoven.com/tools/scripts/scripts.asp and I can't seem to find TS-related scripts on DevNet. Help?

Thanks!

Jamik

You should be able to create a "Browse" script pretty easily in perl. You could also potentially write it in Java (or even in .Net if you're environment is set up for it). If you don't know either of those languages then you should probably hire someone who does to write this for you. Since this is your custom code you should be creating your own custom Browse instead of relying on TS for the browse since any upgrade you'll have to make sure your custom code will work with their browse instead of having it all controlled by your custom code.

fiquebem

You should be able to create a "Browse" script pretty easily in perl.

Maybe. But I don't want to do that. Nor do I want to pay anyone to do it. I simply want to steal someone else's code. ("Amateurs copy; professionals steal.") There should be an easier way to find contributed Perl scripts on DevNet. Or is it that just aren't many TS (as opposed to SitePublisher) "components" pon DevNet?

Anyway, while building the elusive CGI interface to allow the user to move files at will without breaking links, I ran into this problem: If the workarea has thousands of files, it's taking too long for the CGI script to respond. Meanwhile, the Web server (Apache) seems to be timing out.

I searched the 'Net and ran into this solution -- "Watching long processes through CGI": http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/col39.html.

After adapting it to my CGI script, I'm running into this error: The fork function is unimplemented at ...\custom_move.ipl line 566.\r, referer: http://hostname/iw-bin/custom_move.ipl.

I'm using TS 6.7.2 SP2 on Windows 2000. TS 6.7.2 comes with Perl v5.8.2.

Thoughts? Is the server (Windows 2000) the problem?

ISCBorisB

fork system call does not exist in Windows. Corresponding Perl function that uses it has been therefore "unimplemented"