The Plan

Transferring data from your current CHILI publisher installation to GraFx Publisher is easy. The hardest part is the planning and logistics.

• Do you want to transfer all your environments in one go?

• Do you want to transfer one at a time?

• Are you going to do an initial transfer and then a final transfer?

• Will there be multiple transfer phases?

These are the questions you and your team must answer.

In general, most clients follow one of two processes:

• Transfer All - transfer one, test, transfer all, test, cutover

• Transfer Each - transfer each environment, test, cutover per environment

Transfer All

Best for an integration where there is one main site that uses multiple environments.

The process works by first transferring one environment, and testing a development integration with that one environment. Once the development integration is cleared to work, all other environments are transferred, and the integration is upgraded to handle the new SaaS endpoints. Finally, the integration is scheduled to cutover from on-prem to GraFx Publisher, one final transfer is planned to synchronize files, and the entire production site is switched to GraFx Publisher.

Typically, this requires one business day of downtime for the final cutover, but the actual time depends on the size and number of the environments being transferred.

Transfer Each

Best for an integration where there are multiple sites for each environment.

The process works by planning to transfer one environment at a time and testing a development integration with each environment. For each environment, once the development integration is cleared to work with that environment, a cutover is planned. During that cutover, one last transfer is made to synchronize, and then the production site is switched to GraFx Publisher.

Typically, this requires half a business day of downtime for the final cutover for each environment.

Determine your plan or create a new plan of your own. The Customer Success team will help as best they can, but keep in mind that the choice is ultimately up to your team. Also keep in mind that no matter what you do, there will be scheduled downtime. The final cutover requires files to be transferred and that takes time.

The Process

After you have your plan, the process of transferring data is quite simple.

It requires four simple steps:

1. Getting the environment ID and request a transfer

2. Transfer with the Data Migration Toolkit

3. Notify the Customer Success team when the transfer is complete

Step 1: Getting the environment ID and request a transfer

You will first need to create a ticket on https://mysupport.chili-publish.com/ requesting a data transfer.

When you make this ticket, please include the environment ID or IDs that you are wishing to transfer. You can find the IDs by clicking on an environment in the https://chiligrafx-dev.com/environments and finding the ID in the URL.

https://chiligrafx-dev.com/environments and select an environment

Grab the ID from the URL

If you are having trouble getting the IDs, please share the environment name or BackOffice URL.

In your ticket, if you are looking to setup a transfer date for a production cutover, please make sure to ask at least 10 days in advance.

The Client Success team may ask you about your environment size, you get this from Windows native tools like file explorer or using the Data Migration Tool.

Step 2: Transfer with the Data Migration Toolkit

Download the Data Migration Toolkit

You can use this tool to run a report which will gives you environment statistics such as file size, number of files, and average script execution time. This is done by running the command CreateEnvironmentReport and specifying your environment's path.

.\CHILI.Migration.CLI CreateEnvironmentReport -d "C:\chili_data\Environments\test"

-d is the path to your environment

Before Transfer

If you are doing a production transfer (not just testing). You need to fix potential absolute paths in the resource files can cause issues post-migration, especially in cloud environments. To avoid this, the FixAbsolutePathsInDataXml command converts absolute paths to relative ones.

.\CHILI.Migration.CLI FixAbsolutePathsInDataXml -d "C:\chili_data\Environments\test"

-d is the path to your environment

Run this command immediately before copying data. Because after changes in data.xml files, some resources may not work correctly locally. That is why we suggest it only for a production transfer.

If you backed up your data.xml files, you can just restore them to undo the changed made by FixAbsolutePathsInDataXml

Transferring Data

Single Environment Transfer

To migrate a single environment to the cloud-based storage, use the CopyEnvironmentToDropzone command. This requires the path to your environment and the environment ID. It's recommended to perform this operation when your system is under minimal load and has sufficient free RAM (at least 4GB).

.\CHILI.Migration.CLI CopyEnvironmentToDropzone -d "C:\chili_data\Environments\test" -e "45bbcd53-6334-48a9-8394-0cf4821d7bbc"

-d is the path to your environment

-e is your environment ID

By default, the history of documents and assets will not be transferred. This decision is aimed at increasing the speed of transfer, especially in large environments where these files can number in the hundreds of thousands. Since very few clients utilize this feature for any real production use-case, the transfer of history files is disabled by default.

The history files are used in the BackOffice to display changes to a file including preview errors and file update dates.

If you need to transfer history files, you can re-enable this feature by using the -i parameter and setting it to true.

For example:

CopyEnvironmentToDropzone -d "C:\chili_data\Environments\test" -e "45bbcd53-6334-48a9-8394-0cf4821d7bbc" -i true

Multi Environment Transfer

Alternatively, the Data Migration Toolkit now supports a multi-environment transfer option. If you are planning to utilize this option, it is important to inform the support team prior to your cutover day.

Step 3: Notify the Customer Success team when the transfer is complete

After all the data has transferred, then you will notify the Customer Success team via the original ticket that all data has transferred.

If there are failures, notify the Customer Success team. In rare cases, a small number of documents will fail to transfer, which usually is small enough to handle manually.

If you did not set a date in Step1, it will take 1 to 4 business days for the data to be transferred from the dropzone to your environment (or environments).

The Customer Success team will reply back with the environment is ready.