Migration troubles on webform module

Dear Drupal support,

I received the email containing the information above for the migration.
I followed the instructions, creating the temporary website, and later I received the confirmation that the migration had finished.

From what I understand, this implies that the URL of my original website has been now linked to the Drupal 8 website.

I then received the email below [1], which warns me that the Drupal 7 instance will be deleted.

The thing that puzzles and worries me is that the email contains the original URL as if it was still linked to the Drupal 7 instance.

Can you please confirm this is an error and that the URL correctly points to the Drupal 8 instance, and that the deletion of the Drupal 7 won’t affect in any way the functionality of the URL and of the Drupal 8 instance?

Thank you very much in advance

Cheers,
Pietro

[1]
You are contacted as administrator of the Drupal 7 website [cmsstatisticscommitteequestionnaire.web.cern.ch](https:// cmsstatisticscommitteequestionnaire.web.cern.ch)

The Drupal 7 infrastructure at CERN will be decommissioned summer 2020 [1] and all Drupal 7 websites will then become unavailable .

 To keep your website online you need to      **take action https:// drupal-community.web.cern.ch/t/drupal-7-end-of-life-actions/496**

If this website is no longer needed , please delete it from the webservices portal to stop receiving further notifications: Delete cmsstatisticscommitteequestionnaire https:// webservices.web.cern.ch/webservices/Tools/DeleteSite/?SiteName=cmsstatisticscommitteequestionnaire

For any question don’t hesitate to reach out to us at the [Drupal community forum](https:// drupal-community.web.cern.ch/c/migrating-from-drupal-7).

This is the 2nd reminder of the ongoing Drupal 7 migration campaign.

Dear @vischia,

I saw you have requested the migration of your Drupal 7 site https://cmsstatisticscommitteequestionnaire.web.cern.ch into the Drupal 8 site https://cmsstatcommmigration.web.cern.ch, so at this point everything is correct regarding our operations.

Now, what we expect from you, is that you review your new Drupal 8 site, in order to check if everything was properly migrated, and in the case you encounter some issues, let us know either through the chat, or through this forum.

Said that, it’s not our responsibility to delete your Drupal 7 site, since this belongs to you, hence you are the full reponsible for it and to take actions on it.

If for some reason you do want to keep the same name you had in your Drupal 7, I invite you to read carefully the following post (Publish Drupal 8 site with the original site name used in Drupal 7), where all the possibilities and instructions are very well explained.

Hope this clarifies your concerns.

Cheers,
Ismael

Dear @iposadat,

thank you very much! I think the original email mentioned that the change of URL destination would have been automatic, but OK. I’ll follow the instructions, they are clear indeed!

Cheers,
Pietro

3 Likes

Uhm, I can see in the new site the page I had created in the old site, but it’s empty, whereas it is supposed to contain a form linked to the website database (migrated to the new site I hope).

I thought maybe the migration has failed to activate the various modules, so I activated the “webform” module, but the page which should contain the webform still does not show anything.

This is a CMS service that we had hosted on an AFS area although everything was working perfectly, just because apparently there was an IT policy saying that everything had to migrate to stuff like Drupal.
We already have complied putting up this website, and don’t really think it is up to us (nor that we have the qualifications to) look into complex migrations.
To us the thing is super-simple: we had a webform connected to a database, and the migration does not result neither in a webform neither in a database (from what I can see, but without webform accessing the old entries I don’t really know if the database is there).

Could you please advise on how to recover the webform (it’s huge, with tricky cross-references and automatic emails based on fields etc, so it is completely unfeasible to recreate it by hand) and its database in the new instance?

EDIT:
We expect that the overall effect of the migration is that the new website has the same URL of the old one (this I understand can be done with self-service link you posted, thanks), but also that the functionality is out of the box exactly the same in a seamless way, and this is not currently the case.

The ticket I had submitted specified all these requirements already, see screenshot.

Dear CERN Drupal Support,

just a reminder of this open thread because of failures in the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

The website is currently running in its Drupal 7 instance because the Drupal 8 one does not reproduce the functionality of the Drupal 7 one.

We need the Drupal 8 to have an exact copy of both the database (updated to the moment in which the base URL is made to point to the Drupal 8 instance, we cannot loose entries in the database) and of the webform (and the corresponding needed module activated)

Another solution is to keep the Drupal 7 instance working even after the dismission of Drupal 7; from our point of view we don’t really care about switching to Drupal 8, this is something that has been initiated by you.

Thank you in advance

Pietro for the CMS Statistics Committee

Dear Pietro,

Let me first add one clarification, in case other people arrive to this topic. We, Drupal infrastructure team, provide the infrastructure facilities (currently Drupal 7 and Drupal 8) to host Drupal sites centrally at CERN. It was never our mission to provide a seamless migration between Drupal versions, but to provide tools to facilitate this task to the site administrators. This is no something self-imposed by us, but rather based on circumstances. The tool itself Drupal, is not providing a very complete migration path, and we have to adapt our tools on what is provided and the maturity of the modules. We have also noticed that migrations from Drupal 7 to 8 are, depending on the site, very specific and requires sometimes a big effort for our users to succeed. But I hope you understand that is very difficult from our position ensuring the migration of sites that we were never involved in the development and please also note that the time effort that this will require for the total number of sites we have hosted will make impossible our regular duties on providing a production service.

What we can do, and we try our best is to provide the guidance, fixes when possible, and tools to perform the migration.

Once clarified that, let’s enter into your issue.

You are totally right and there was some misunderstanding during the initial migration of the site, and the webform content was not migrated. This I’ve resolved by re-doing the migration but this time also including the webform_migrate module in the process (https://www.drupal.org/project/webform_migrate)

But then, when verifying more in detail the result, I’ve noticed few issues I was closely debugging and trying to resolve. As you can see the webform was this time migrated, https://cmsstatcommmigration.web.cern.ch/admin/structure/webform.
But there are two problems I would like to make you aware

  • Many of the “Select” types are wrongly assigned (for example from multiple options into radios) After close inspection I’m not sure if this is a bug on the webform_migrate module or a concrete problem with your webform configuration.
  • The 278 submissions looks as imported, but all the webform values are not and they appear as empty.

So at this point, and after expending a fair amount of time on this, I would propose you a couple of options based on my conclusion and effort analysis.

1 - One option, and for me the simpler, will be to take the current status of the Drupal 8 migrated site as starting point. Work on the Webform definition, to fix any inconsistency after the migration, like transforming those radio elements into Select options. Once done I would suggest to export the current results of the Drupal 7 site as Excel or CSV file. The new fixed webform on Drupal 8 will be used for new data to be created while a uploaded link to the Excel/CSV file will be used as reference to access previous submissions from Drupal 7.

2 - The other option, and what I was trying to perform before writing here is to (without much success), export the data from the Drupal 7 site on CSV and then import it on the Drupal 8 webform by using the module “Webform Submission Export/Import” But I must say after few difficulties and due the time spent, I wouldn’t recommend this. There are some transformations to be done and adapted to prepare the CSV file exported from Drupal 7 site into Drupal 8. and then some manual mapping between CSV columns and Webform elements. And at the end I cannot confirm that the result will be good enough.

I would be happy to assist you, if you are interested on the first alternative I propose, I really understand how important is for you to have the full data migrated and how annoying this migration is being for you, but having into account the issues encountered, the Drupal expertise on your side and the time constraints also on both your and my side, I think this might be a good compromise to get this migration on-going and keep the needed functionality working for the next years.