No .xml files extracted in content migration package (.cmp)

Question

Currently we have a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise installation running on a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise box with SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise as our back end database.

We're currently working on a project to translate our site into various languages and are utilizing the Export Variations feature in the Manage Content and Structure view. When using the export feature, the site loading bar spins for some time and then the content migration package (.cmp) file downloads. I'm following along this blog post to learn how to implement SharePoint variations. After the .cmp file is downloaded to my local machine, the article(s) said that the extension should be changed to .cab so that we can see the files contained inside. For all other subsites, several .xml files were contained in the packaged file (including TranslatableFieldSettings.xml and Manifest.xml). For this particular file though, I only have .dat files.

Unfortunately, I've exhausted all my SharePoint knowledge and resources. I've ensured all files in the directory are checked in and re-run the export to no success. This directory contains a lot of static CMS content. In fact it is our largest one in terms of storing copy that is displayed on the pages. Does anyone have any ideas? Could this possibly be a data size issue preventing the export from completing successfully and causing it to error out silently?

Answer 1

After some digging, I managed to resolve the problem. I found this article on the Microsoft MSDN site. One section in particular caught my eye:

By default, the .cmp files are limited to 24 MB in size, although you can change this value using the FileMaxSize property. If set to zero, the value resets to the default.

This stood out to me right away as the two subsites that I was having problems with were the two largest subsites on the site.

The next paragraph states the following:

When site data exceeds the specified limit, site data is separated in to two or more migration files. However, if a single site data file exceeds the maximum file size, the operation does not split the source file, but rather it resizes the .cmp file to accommodate the oversize file. You can have any number of .cmp files.

For us, this was not the case. We were having content migration packages (.cmp) files returned with a file size of 0 KB. To this day, I will cannot get the GUI "Export Variation" option to work.

We did find a work around however. The work around utilizes the Export-SPWeb functionality built into the SharePoint Administration Console (PowerShell). The functionality is defined as follows:

Export-SPWeb http://site -Path "site export.cmp"

The full description can be fond here.

By specifying our subsite (http://site/subsite), the local path to extract the file to (C:\Location\name.cmp) and setting the CompressionSize to 999999, we were able to extract out a full copy of the content migration package. Packages extracted via this method override the size limitation and do contain the required .xml files.

Importing:

There is a function called Import-SPWeb which manually uploads the package back into SharePoint. We tested this functionality as well and confirmed that it did indeed work. The format for this command is the following:

Import-SPWeb http://site -Path export.cmp -UpdateVersions Overwrite

The full description can be found here.