Hello Lee, Joe or anyone else who wishes to respond.

I am about complete with this project of creating a development site however I have run into just a couple of kinks which probably are no brainers for nuke masters which I am quickly on my way to but for me I just can't figure them out.

The first is writing a skin over a skin.  Let me explain myself a little more clearer.  You see with the set up I have for development do to my circumstances I needed to set up the development site on a subfolder of the root of the host account and then have a domain pointer routed from the root to this subfolder making the subfolder the defacto root.  This is all good and well except for a couple of issues.

The live database (installed on the root of the account) that I am transporting to a development site has much of the skins it uses pathed from the root and not a sub folder.  For example elements of the skin that is used such as graphics are currently pointed to in the following way  "/portals/_default/..."  They need to be pointed to in this way "/subdirectory/Portals/_default/..."  Of course the easy thing to do is to use web development studio and do a quick find and replace on the default.aspx file which goes with the skin in question.  That way all hard wired pointers can be rewired in seconds to my needs. 

The problem I am facing however is not how to rewire the path to reflect the path of this development installation but rather is it possible to, after making the nescessary changes to collect all files in the skin, package it up under the same skin name as most of my site is using and than install that package with the very identical name of the skin in use (wiith the now incorrect path do to bringing a database from a root installation to a subfolder installation) and install that package so it will simply overrite all old information that the other skin held hence cascading the path change as it pertains to skin through the web site so anysite that now used this skin (in my case subpage) would now be able to not have broken links do to misdriected path.



Now the other question deals with rewiring all other links now broken within the text/html module.  I went through the tutorial concerning installding the procedure on the database itself either via ssmse or simply via dotnetnuke interface and than creating a script that replaced one string for another within the text/html document but when I attempted this routine for some reason I only got a message that 1 row was affected and within ssmse the little green animated circle indicating script execution kept going and going and going.  I realize it had to perhaps search and change an awful lot of references but is it realistic to think that a large site with multiple pages would case this kind of querey to take more than an hour and a half to perform.  Is it possible for a script to somehow get stuck in an endless loop and never do anything.  I never got a confirmation of completiong yet before I executed the script I was told the preflight of the script was successful and no errors seemed to be their that would cause the script to have problems.

Yet this seemingly effecting 1 row business with  the endless green circle animation spinning and spinning for more than an hour and seemingly doing nothing as I tested out pieces of the site after just stopping the script because I couldn't see it was getting anywhere.

I was wondering if you ran into similar issues with using this procedure with replace command and what other solutions might be available to do an across the board database find and replace routine as it pertains to hardwired paths within text/html modules thanks so much for your help.

Bo

Hello,

1) yes you can just make changes to a skin and re-upload the skin with the same skin name and it will override the previous skins settings

2) I have not come across this problem with SQL find and replace, I would first of all suggest you try this in a localhost test environment, just as we did in the tutorial to ensure that you are following all of the steps correctly.

I had the need yesterday to fix a lot of links that resulted from moving a site from one host to another. I found that the F3 module from Engage Software was a great help. Basically, you install the module on a page available only to administrators, key in the text string you want to find and the module returns a list of the instances of that string. You can then examine and edit them one at a time, or you can key in a replacement string and do them all at once.

The module is a freebie.