{Yes folks ... it's been a long time since the last blog entry. What better topic to resume with than the exporter utility for which the author has gained a small measure of recognition ?}
In years gone by the OMNIbus Web GUI was called "Webtop" and there was no explicit import/export utility that allowed taking part or all of a Webtop configuration and exporting it from a development environment to a production environment. The exporter began life as a way to do that, taking advantage of the Webtop Administration Application Programming Interface (WAAPI for short) introduced with Webtop 1.1.
From the beginning, there's always been the tension that WAAPI has not supported the complete set of configuration options that the Admin GUI provides. This has continued from version to version of Webtop and Web GUI - but it's been "close enough" for many people to find the exporter useful.
When Webtop GUI 7.3.1 was introduced, there was finally a native, supported import/export function included with the product. This reduced the demand for the exporter somewhat, but the feature sets don't strictly overlap. The native export/import has the great advantage of working in conjunction with TIP (and now DASH) import/export so that an entire portal configuration (including role assignments, views, pages. console preference profiles, etc.) can be exported from one environment to another.
The exporter is a better choice when you are moving Web GUI objects only and you are changing versions (e.g. from 7.4 -> 8.1). It's also the only option if you are looking to generate WAAPI output.
--
The last "released" version (2.5) of the exporter supported Web GUI through 7.3.1 (yeah... it's been a while). There were any number of "betas" that supported 7.4, but along came Web GUI 8.1. So this release, 2.6, supports Web GUI through 8.1
Here's the Linux version. It's a 32 bit executable that should work fine on 64 bit systems as long as the appropriate library is installed. If you have a 64 bit system and you get this error:
./ncw_export: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory
Then you'll need to do this:
# yum -y install glibc.i686
I'll be posting for other architectures soon.
