How to modify an xml.zip file to work past import errors?

[william.walberg]

Greetings all,

I had an instance of Confluence Server that we worked to migrate to Confluence Cloud. We exported the spaces individually and shut down the server. I have all the xml.zip files. It turns out, one of the spaces was skipped in the import process because it was giving an error and we never resolved that issue before taking down the server.

So I'm a little stuck with the file giving me an error when we attempt to upload and I cannot modify the original space and attempt a new export because that instance of Confluence Server no longer exists.

Is there any way I can modify the contents of the .xml.zip file such that we can at least import the error-free portions of the space? Even just getting this partially uploaded will be greatly beneficial.

The error we are getting is: No row with the given identifier exists: [com.atlassian.confluence.spaces.Space#169771009].

Thanks in advance for any help.

[william.walberg · Accepted solution]

It turned out that the error was because the space already existed in the trash. A more descriptive error message certainly would've helped in my situation. To that end, anyone else feeling the same way could add themselves as a watcher here and vote accordingly:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-78788

[Jim Knepley - ReleaseTEAM]

Going back 5 or 6 years now, I was trying to move from a Confluence server in a data center to a data center installation in AWS. We exported the site to XML, and then imported it... or at least tried to. The XML exporter hasn't properly encoded non-printable characters that seemed to sneak in via copy-paste. Thankfully the Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant seems to handle that much better.

I suspect you might be bumping against the same issue with XML entities.

You can unzip the space export to get the raw XML. The problem I had was that parsing the XML took more RAM than I had available, so we ended up not moving to AWS.

If your raw XML is small enough, feed it to an external XML parser, and hopefully, that will highlight specific lines where the XML isn't well-formed. Fix them by hand, re-zip, and you should be set.

[william.walberg]

Hey Jim, thanks so much for weighing in on an option here. I'm going to comment with what the fix was but truly appreciate you taking the time.