Copying Universes with Access Restrictions in BOXI 3.1

Posted on by EV Technologies

In a perfect world, everything would be simple and work perfectly the first time. Sadly, such is not the case. A client recently asked me to create copies of some of their universes. The only minor catch was that two of their universes used access restrictions. No problem. Easy stuff. Or so I thought.

I fired up Universe Designer and imported the universe. I set the new name in the universe’s parameters, saved, and exported. Finally I re-imported the universe to confirm that everything in the world was right. I opened the access restrictions…and was greeted by a blank window.

Blank_Restrictions

Fail.

Fortunately, a bit of experimentation yielded a simple solution:

  1. Import the universe in Universe Designer and save it. Note the path of the local version.
  2. Browse to the file’s location on Windows and create a copy of the universe’s file and folder.
  3. Open the newly copied file in Universe Designer.
  4. Assign a new name in parameters.
  5. Save and export.
  6. This is very important – When exporting you will be prompted with the following WARNING message:
     

    Universe_Update_Warning

    Click COPY

  7. Finally, check your work. Close the file in Universe Designer and import the newly copied universe back from the server. Verify that the restrictions carried over.

In most cases everything worked perfectly. However, in one instance I had to remap the group/restrictions and set the priorities. In any case, the restrictions were all there and it was still much faster than rebuilding the restrictions from scratch.

2 thoughts on “Copying Universes with Access Restrictions in BOXI 3.1”

  1. Hello,
    I know, in some cases copy universe is right approach, but you should be careful and check the SHORTNAME of both universes in query builder, I think it will be the same. Please confirm.
    Why I’m mentioning this, because WEBI linked to universe either by CUID or shortname, so if something will happening to CUID (it is possible specially when you promote universe from one environment or BIAR to target CMS) than WEBI will try to link itself to first universe with matching shortname, but it might not be the “right” one.
    We can talk more about via email.

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