I’ve blogged about this before with Candace’s Part 1 and Part 2. She just published Part 3 in the series. Here she focuses on what to do once you’ve extracted and transformed the content. In other words, getting that web content into the target system. In this case it’s Sitecore, a popular .NET based WCM. I think it’s great Candace took the time to walk through a step by step approach to this. Go to her post for the full set of steps and details.
Once data is extracted and transformed, the clean data is sitting in database tables ready to be uploaded into Sitecore. Sitecore has an Item Web API available for uploading data, but it is limited to basic retrieval, creation, and update operations. How was I going to tie related records together? How could I perform basic if/else operations that were necessary? It was obvious almost immediately that the Item Web API would not be adequate.
Because I had so much system specific processing to do, I decided to write my own upload process, using the Sitecore API. If this were an ongoing process, it would have been necessary to build a more automated, flexible way to upload this data, but because it was a once and done operation, and time was short, the solution outlined below was sufficient. I wrote a rather ugly web page that allowed me to click through the upload process quite quickly:
You can also see some of what Candace describes at a much higher level on Youtube
