Publishing and deleting personalization rules using a script

We can use a HCL WebSphere Portal Personalization provided script, pznload, to export, publish, and delete Personalization rules on local or remote servers.

We can script the delivery of rules and campaigns from staging to production, or the offline publishing between disconnected systems (such as when production servers are secured behind a firewall). We can use this function to quickly revert production servers to an earlier state.

To run the pznload script, first run the setupCmdLine batch file to set up the WebSphere Application Server parameters. The setupCmdLine.bat file is in the wp_profile\bin directory. Publishing through the command line is a two-step process. First, you export the personalization rules that we want to transfer from the authoring environment to a remote system. After we are done exporting and saving the required objects, we use the pznload script to send this data to the appropriate server.

Tip: For extra help on using the pznload script, run the --help command.

1. We can export the personalization rules on the site or we can run the pznload command. Select one of the following methods to export personalization objects from the site:
   • Click More Actions > Export in the Personalization Navigator. You are prompted for a location to save a nodes file. This file contains an XML representation of all the currently selected personalization objects. We can export entire folders.

     
     

     
     

   • Open a command prompt and run, where out designates the location of the exported data on your local system and targetpath is the object (and child) that is exported:

     pznload --export --out filename --serverurl url --targetpath path --targetworkspace workspace --username username --password password

2. Choose the appropriate option to send this data to the appropriate server:

   The pznload script is in the PortalServer_root/pzn/prereq.pzn/publish/ directory.

   Tip: This program accepts a number of command-line options and a set of nodes files to publish. Start pznload with the --help option to see a list of all options. The most important arguments are described here:

   serverurl

   The URL of the remote publish servlet. If we do not specify a value, the program attempts to connect to a HCL WebSphere Portal server that is running on the local machine. If we do specify a value, it must follow the format of http(s)://localhost:{port}/{WpsContextRootPath}/pznpublish/pznpublishtarget. Where it's either http or https, the port is the port of the particular Portal server we want to connect to and WpsContextRootPath is the root context path for that Portal server. For example, http://localhost:10039/wps/pznpublish/pznpublishtarget.

   targetworkspace

   The name of the workspace to publish to. The default workspace name on all IBM Content Manager runtime edition installations is ROOTWORKSPACE.

   targetpath

   The location in the target workspace, which is the parent for the published nodes. The target path must exist before publishing. For example, if the export function was used on the folder /Projects/HR website, then the target path is specified as /Projects. So that the published resources are in /Projects/HR website.

   username

   A valid user on the target system with sufficient access rights.

   password

   The password for the user.

   ./pznload.sh --serverurl url --targetpath path --targetworkspace workspace --username username --password password

3. To delete objects, run the following command where targetpath is the object (and all associated child) that is deleted.

   pznload --delete --username username --password password --targetpath path

   Note: To force the deletion of a personalization rule without having to respond to a confirmation message, insert the --force flag after the delete command. For example, pznload --delete --username username --password password --targetpath path --force

After a publish is started, you see status messages in the command console.

Parent topic: Publishing personalization rules