Importing portal sites

You can import an existing portal site from a WebSphere® portal server. Importing is useful when you want to create a new portal project or update the configuration of a project that is already in your workspace. When you import a site from WebSphere Portal V6.1, the static pages that are defined on the server are also imported with their content.

About this task

The portal site configuration on the WebSphere portal server contains the following resources: global settings, resource definitions, the portal content tree. Importing these resources from a WebSphere portal server overwrites duplicate resources in the existing portal project. Unique resources from the server configuration are copied into the existing portal project. Similarly, resources that are unique to the portal project are not affected unless you select the Delete project on overwrite option in the Import wizard.

Rational® tools use the XML configuration interface to import a portal site configuration, and optionally retrieve files from the web application directory. When you create a new portal project, then you must retrieve the files from the directory. For more details on defining a portal server for import, see the related topics. The portal configuration in an imported project does not contain all of the configuration information from the portal server. If you deploy the imported project to another server, it does not have complete configuration information.

If the portal server has more than one label or page of the same order, the order of top-level labels and pages in the newly imported portal project might differ from the order that was on the portal server.

Procedure

To import portal sites:

If the JSP files or Java™ classes on the portal server refer to classes in external JAR files:
1. Set the Java build path to prevent compilation errors when you import the project.
2. Import external JAR files from the websphere_installation_directory/lib or portal_installation_directory/shared/app directories on the portal server to your development machine.
3. Add the directories to your Java build path. To set the Java build path:
  1. In the Project Explorer view, right-click the project and select Properties.
  2. In the left pane, select Java Build Path.
  3. In the right pane, select the Libraries tab.
  4. Add the referenced JAR file and click OK to save the configuration.
Create a new portal project.
Click File > Import.
In the Select window, select Portal as an import source. Click Next.
In the Import Portal Project window, select a portal server. If the server window is empty, click New to define a server. For more information about defining a server for import, see Defining local servers for testing portals.
From the Portal project list, select the name of the portal project. You can also enter a name for your portal project for import.
Under Import Options, choose whether you want to import the configuration and files, or must only the configuration.
If you import the configuration and files, the files from the web application directory are imported, including the JSP, CSS, and image files for themes and skins. Also in the Import Options window is a check box labeled Delete project on overwrite, which is only active if you are importing to an existing portal project. If you select this option, the existing portal project and all of its artifacts are deleted before the overwrite. Click Finish.

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