More Granular Options for Importing Site Content

Description

Sakai users often request the ability to selectively import a subset of items from one site to another during the Site Info > Import from Site process. Currently, it is an all or nothing process for items within a tool. You either import all of the Lessons from a site, or none of them. The same is true of other tools containing multiple items, such as Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, Resources, Discussions, etc.

In practice, this means that instructors or site owners are often forced to import everything from another site, when they really only wanted a handful of items. After importing everything, they then have to go through all of the content and delete the items they don’t want. This can be laborious, not to mention confusing, particularly if there are any similarly names items in both the copied site and the target site.

There are some workarounds for bringing over individual items, such as exporting and importing individual quizzes from Tests & Quizzes, or using the newly added ability to copy a single Lessons page from another site (SAK-47706). However, these options are also not always ideal, since they ONLY let you do one item at a time. If you want 5 quizzes out of 20, you’d need to export and then import them one at a time - repeating the process 5 times. If you want 3 Lessons pages out of 15, you would have to repeat the process 3 times, once for each individual page. Also, there are some items that don’t copy when you copy a page individually this way in Lessons (i.e. LTI links or the content on subpages of the page you are copying).

I would like to propose a more granular approach to the selection of items for copying via Import from Site. This would allow instructors or site owners to have more control over the content they copy from one site to another, and save lots of time deleting things that were unnecessarily copied in the first place. Ideally, when selecting the tools for import, the user would also be able to expand a given tool and select a subset of items within that tool if desired.

For most tools, this selection process should be relatively straightforward. However, for Lessons, which also contains links to content within other tools, the import will need to be smart enough to also include items from other tools which are linked on the selected Lessons pages. For example, if you select Lesson Page 1 to be copied, and that page includes Assignment 1, Quiz 1, Discussion 1, and links to 5 items within Resources, then all of the associated items in those other tools should be automatically selected for inclusion when the Lessons page is imported.

I’m including rough mockups of what the Import from Site content selection screen might look like.

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Christina Schwiebert March 27, 2024 at 8:21 PM
Edited

Since there are a whole list of tools, I made a table. Site Info → Import From Site shows any problems / unexpected views when selecting the items to import. Import Results shows if there were any issues with the content that was actually imported. indicates that it worked as expected. indicates a critical failure of this feature

One universal problem is that all tools that can be partially imported are not adding the tool to the site if it doesn’t already exist. Creating a new Jira for that.

Tool

Site Info → Import From Site

Import Results

Assignments


Does work with the publish content option (thank you for not breaking this!)

Announcements

Lessons

Subpages are not indented, everything appears as a single level

Imports all pages & subpages, regardless of what is selected.
What is the expected behavior if only a subpage is selected, not the parent page?

Discussions

Lists forums only, not topics

Calendar

No individual events selectable

Resources

Only lists top-level files, not folders

Can’t test folders, only files

Rubrics

Syllabus

Conversations

Signup

No individual events selectable

Tests & Quizzes

I alternated Merge and Replace for different tools, but didn’t have existing content to make sure that it kept/overwrote that as expected.

Automation for Jira February 27, 2024 at 11:29 AM

A pull request has been created, "SAK-49673 sitemanage. Allow import of selected tool items", you can see it at https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/pull/12403

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Created January 24, 2024 at 9:36 PM
Updated February 13, 2025 at 12:06 AM