There are many scenarios where you need to export and import Opalis policies, for example between your Opalis development environment and your Opalis production environment. There are actually two places in Opalis Integration Server where you can do a export, first on a policy tab and then on a folder. In this blog post we will look at these two.

If you select Export on a folder you will get the Export dialog box. The Export dialog box allows you to

• Specify file location, where to store the export file
• configure if you want to export sub folders too
• configure if you want to export global settings (for example counters, variables and computer groups)
• configure if you want to export global configuration (options > configuration in the Opalis Integration Server client)

If you export a folder, including a sub-folder, total of two policies, with all default settings in the export dialog box, you get a complete export including the folder structure, global settings, connection settings and policies from the folder and sub folder. As you can see in the picture, the export also includes Global settings that the two policies don’t use. If you already have the global settings you can choose if you want to override them or keep them as they are.

If you do export on a policy tab you will not get the same result as if you right-click a folder and do export. This will only give you the policy that you did the export on and global settings it use. But you will still get the global settings folder structure of the source environment. In the picture above I will get the 1., 1.1, 1.2 and 2  folders under Variables, but as I exported policy 1.2 there will be noting in the folders except for the 1.2 folder.

If for example folder 2. already exists under Variables you get a question asking you if you want to overwrite it or create a new. If you select create new, you will get a new folder named “2. (1)”. If you select override it will merge the folder with the variables to import and the ones in the folder already. You can step through all items and select overwrite or not, for example if you only want to overwrite a couple variables. If you create a new folder during import the policy will be update to use the new variable, even if there already exist one with the same name.

In both export scenario the export file contains data that you not necessary need or want to import into the target environment. To avoid overwrite a policy, connection configuration or setting by mistake you can clean up the export file between export and import. There are a couple of tools from Microsoft partners that can do this, but you can also use a extra Opalis installation. It can be a single server running Opalis where you import the export file, modify it and export to a new file. You then use the new export file to import into the target Opalis environment. In my sandbox that machine is named mrWolf, from the efficient clean-up expert “the Wolf” in Pulp Fiction.  🙂 This Opalis environment is keept total empty by default, it is then very easy to see what data was imported when I run a import. When the clean-up is done, it is easy to see what will be exported, as everything in there will be included.

Please note that this is provided “as is” with no warranties at all.