Copy/Move a Web Site to another Site Collection

Now I am sure all of us in the SharePoint community had to move or copy a site's library and/or lists to another site collection. There are various reasons for this, in our case it was because of governance.

Long story short:
- One content database
- One site collection
- Multitude of web sites.
- Limit on content database size of 100GB (now there is a whole discussion about what size a content database should be and could be, but let's not go there now).

Mission:
- Move a web site (subsite) out of the current site collection to a new site collection in it's own content database.

The easy part is to create the Content Database, add it to the Web Application, create the new blank Site Collection in the Content Database, set the properties of the Content Database to only 1 Site Collection.

If you are lucky, the owners of the Web Site did not implement Workflow, Lookup lists or something else(Features) that can complicate the move.

Then you would probably use STSADM command line and do your stuff.

In my case the users implemented Lookup lists/fields. While this is nice to use in SharePoint, and you should try do design your site with this in mind. It reallllly makes it difficult to move. So that is why governance/design at a higher level is important. Then you *don't* have to move the site.

Anyway, no use crying over spilled milk.

A lookup field is a field that gets a value from another field in another list. You could have multiple lookup fields that uses multiple other lists.

Say you have a MAIN List:

MAIN List
Field A, Field B, Lookup Field C (Lookup Value from LIST 1, Field Z)

LIST 1
ID Field A, Field B, Field Z
1: Value 1, Value 2, Value FFFF
2: Value 2, Value 5, Value AAAA
3: Value 6, Value 1, Value LLLL

You add a record to MAIN:
Value A, Value B, Value LLLL

The lookup field's value in the MAIN List is stored as such: "RowId;#Value", i.e "3;#Value LLLL".

So to move this is not simple. You have to create the Lookup Lists in the Target Site. Import the Values from the Source site Lookup List. Do this for every lookup field. Try to resolve circular Look Ups.

When your Lookup Lists are created and populated then you can start to copy a list with the lookup FIELDS to the target site.

1. Open Site
2. Open Web Site
3. Open List
4. Iterate over List Items
5. Iterate over Item Versions
5. Iterate over Item Fields and copy across to -> TargetSite/WebSite/List/Item/Field
6. If the Field is a Lookup,
6.1 Try to get the Row ID from the Target Lookup List by matching the Source field Value to the arget List Field
6.2 Update the Item[FIELD] to the New ID, and Same Value.

Easy huh? Not by a long shot. It is complicated and it is easy to get confused. Maybe if I have time I will develop my program to be user friendly and so that it can be used for any site.

Don't hold your breath though.