Moving external datasets (XSA) between environments

Question

We are using export service instance and import to move between environments, and setting option to include user runtime data (user's catalog data).  However, even with this option, XSA files are not being imported into the target environment.

Therfore, the VA projects are moved, but their dataset is missing in the target environment.   The current work around is to export all XSA files from the source environment and re-upload the files into target with the same names, and then VA projects work.  Seems like export / import should be doing this automatically.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

jepva · Answer

Thanks, didn't think to check the release notes for that information, you'd think they put it along with the actual export/import section.

Scenarios - think about testing and staging upgrades.  We like to clone prod to stage upgrade environments, but perform tests on the actual production reports (so users could test all their VA reports).

rmoff · Answer

Release notes for 12.2.1.2

Exported BAR Files Don't Include Data Files

When you back up a BI Service Instance into a BAR (Oracle Business Intelligence application archive) file, data files that you uploaded aren't included in the BAR file.When you import the BAR file into a target system, only the metadata for the data files is imported, rather than the data files themselves. To work around this issue, upload the data files into the target system after importing the BAR file.

So yes, it's a known limitation

There are some scenarios where we would want to be able to move between environments.

This is what I'm interested in  -- what scenarios?

jepva · Answer

Have a ticket open and they are "researching", hadn't looked through any MOS articles yet but it's not mentioned in the documentation that it won't migrate XSA yet.  It could get problematic once there are lots of XSA's created by user, there are some scenarios where we would want to be able to move between environments.