Deployment options in Sitecore – packaging vs Serialization

 This post explains the different deployment options available in Sitecore and differences between them. Deployment is nothing but moving Sitecore item changes from one instance of Sitecore to another instance. To do this, in Sitecore we have two different options. 1. Packaging 2. Serialization

Packaging

Creating package & Installing package: Follow this post for complete set of steps to be followed to create a package and then installing this packge in Sitecore. - Deployment in Sitecore using packaging

Serialization

Serializing and Deserializing items in Sitecore: Follow this post for complete set of steps to be followed to create apacgae and then installing this packge in Sitecore. - Serialization and deserialization in Sitecore

Packaging vs Serialization

Deployment Limit

• For package creation in Sitecore there is a size limit of 2GB. You cannot create a package of more than 2GB size. If the package exceeds 2GB then it has to be done in multiple packages.

• There is no size limit for serializing the Sitecore items.

Revert option

• After you deploy the Sitecore items to target instance and then made some changes to most of the items. Now if you want to revert the changes made to some of the items in Sitecore to the previous version (as they are when they are deployed), you cannot revert using the Package option. If you install package again then you might loose the changes which you don't want to. So there is no option to revert selected items to the previous version using Packaging.

• Using Serialization we can achieve this perfectly. There are options 'revert item', 'revert tree', using which we can either revert a single item or an item tree. This revert option will revert the Sitecore items from disk ie., from the serialization folder.

Please comment if you know any more differences between Packaging and Serialization in Sitecore

Serialization and deserialization in Sitecore

 This post explains what serialization and deserialization are, how to serialize and deserialize items in Sitecore and how to move Sitecore changes from one instance to another using this concept without creating a package.

If you are looking for differences between Serialization and packaging or advantages of serialization over packaging then go through this post - Serialization vs Packaging in Sitecore

Serialization:

Serialization is the process of converting an object to byte stream in order to save them to memory or database or to file system. Here is the complete explanation of what Serialization is and how it works, from msdn site.

Serializing Sitecore items/tree:

1. Select the item which you want to serialize. Lets select 'Content' item here

   

2. Then click on 'Serialize' or 'serialize tree' option present under the developer tab at the top.

   Note: The 'Serialize' option will serializes only the selected item but the 'Serialize tree' option will serialize the selected item and its sub items.

   

3. After you click on this option, there won't be any message to confirm that serialization is done. So do not panic. :)

4. Go to the Sitecore instance's folder and check the path ' \Data\serialization\master\sitecore' . Here you could see the serialized files of the 'Content' item. i.e., 'Content.Item' file and 'Content' folder. YOu can confirm the same by checking the last updated date of these two.

Deserialization:

Deserialization is the reverse process of serialization. i.e., converting the byte stream to an object.

Deserializing Sitecore items/tree:

1. Go to the path 'SitecoreFolder\Data\serialization\master\sitecore'

2. Copy the 'Content' folder, 'Content.Item' file and paste in destination folder. The destination folder is nothing but the target machine to which you would like to move the changes. Main the same folder structure in destination Sitecore instance. i.e., Copy those two under 'DestinationSitecoreFolder\Data\serialization\master\sitecore' folder.

3. Now to go the Sitecore content editor, select 'Content' item and click on 'Revert tree' option under Developer tab. A dialogue box will open showing the progress of the revert option. Sitecore will read the serialized files on the desk (the files what we copied just now) and revert the select item and its sub elements as per the files. Thus the changes are moved from source to destination Sitecore instance.

Serialization and Deserialization using Sitecore admin page:

Sometimes we might need to serialize entire database or multiple database i.e., core and master databases. In that situataion you need not to switch databases, instead we can use the Sitecore provided admin page for serialization

Admin page Path: http://domainName/sitecore/admin/serialization.aspx

When you open this page, you can see options to select the database and then to choose whether to serialize or revert databases. So select serialize in the source machine and then copy the entire folder and in the destination path. Then select database in the destination sitecore instance and click on revert option to deserialize.

Source: https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/64/serialization_guide_sc60-64-a4.pdf

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