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Selecting items to transfer

During the export and the import procedures you can select items to transfer from the selection tree view (although you cannot import items that have not been exported).

Content transfer is a two-step process:

  1. Content Porter exports content from the source Content Manager to an intermediate file.
  2. Content Porter imports content from the intermediate file into the destination Content Manager.

When exporting and importing items, Content Porter applies the following rules:

  • Content Porter exports or imports every item that a user explicitly selects in the tree view.
  • Content Porter also exports or imports every item on which a selected item depends, unless this type of dependency has been filtered out.
  • In the export wizard, Content Porter hides all item types in the selection tree view that the Content Manager does not allow this user to see.

As a general rule, users should export only those items that they wish to transfer, and import the entire intermediate file during import (without selecting or dependency filters).

Users can also choose to export more than they need to transfer (for example, all Publications in the source Content Manager) and then import only those items that actually need to be transferred. However, this means that performance suffers unnecessarily. This approach is only recommended in situations where you want to import different content that originates from the same source Content Manager into different destination Content Managers. It might then make sense to produce one export file from which you import selected items several times.