How to retain soft links?

Hi,

I have migrated the content from the old content store (Solaris) to new content store(Linux).

I have done the migration of each branch using iwmigrate CLT.

In my old content store, we have few soft links which is migrated in new store but they are no more remain soft links now i.e. I can see the directories but they are not pointing anywhere.

Is there a way to retain the soft links as is while migration?

Thanks.

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Adam Stoller

I don't recall any such option - but more to the point, having soft (or symbolic) links within a content management system should generally be avoided (IMO). Versioning of a symbolic link doesn't mean anything since it always points to whatever version of the file is in the directory to which it is linked and not to a specific version of a file; Clicking Edit on a symbolic link is likely to be rather confusing since you don't know if you're going to be replacing the link with a new, modified copy of the file or changing the file to which the link is pointing - and if you think its one of those and it turns out to be the other - you can find all sorts of problems occurring and users getting frustrated.

tech17

I don't recall any such option - but more to the point, having soft (or symbolic) links within a content management system should generally be avoided (IMO). Versioning of a symbolic link doesn't mean anything since it always points to whatever version of the file is in the directory to which it is linked and not to a specific version of a file; Clicking Edit on a symbolic link is likely to be rather confusing since you don't know if you're going to be replacing the link with a new, modified copy of the file or changing the file to which the link is pointing - and if you think its one of those and it turns out to be the other - you can find all sorts of problems occurring and users getting frustrated.

Thanks for your inputs ghoti.. I completely agree that using the soft links is not at all a good practice, but the content which we have asked to migrate contains the soft links and business wants the links as it is after migration.
There are more than 200 links present in the old store, so created them manually would be time consuming and chances of skipping is pretty high. Hence, I was looking for some smart way to retain the links.

Has someone else faced such issues earlier?

Thanks.

Adam Stoller

Thanks for your inputs ghoti.. I completely agree that using the soft links is not at all a good practice, but the content which we have asked to migrate contains the soft links and business wants the links as it is after migration.
There are more than 200 links present in the old store, so created them manually would be time consuming and chances of skipping is pretty high. Hence, I was looking for some smart way to retain the links.

Has someone else faced such issues earlier?

Thanks.

If you have a two servers [old and new] - write a script to traverse the old system to find and record information about all symlinks found, then (assuming the script is written to work in two modes - or use another script) run the script on the new server to find the files which are supposed to be symlinks, remove them and replace them with the proper symlink (and submit).