Rock Sweeper

This is a tool that is designed to help you quickly take a production RockRMS database and convert it into one that can be used for sandbox testing or development purposes.

It should be noted that this may not catch every scenario you want it to you. The first time you sweep a database, you should spend extra time looking over the results to make sure everything is in the proper state you expect it to be. The good news is, once you have verified that it is doing everything you thought it would, each time you run it with the same options it will do exactly the same thing. This removes the need to worry that you forgot a step.

Sandbox Usage

These steps assume your sandbox server is a full blown IIS/SQL server.

1. Backup your production Rock database.
2. Backup your production RockWeb folder.
3. Stop IIS (or at least the website that will host sandbox Rock).
4. Restore your Rock database and RockWeb folder to your sandbox server.
5. Run RockSweeper on the sandbox server's database.
6. Restart your IIS service if necessary.

Step 3 is important. You don't want to risk that somebody tries to log into the sandbox server and causes Rock to startup before you have run the sweeping tool on it. Otherwise you might start sending out e-mails from your sandbox server.

Development Usage

These steps are for if you are taking a production database and moving it to a computer where you use Visual Studio and the Rockit SDK.

1. Backup your production Rock database.
2. Ensure your Rockit SDK is running the same release version as the production server.
3. Quit Visual Studio (this ensures the IIS Express is fully stopped).
4. Restore your Rock database to your development box.
5. Run RockSweeper on the development box's database.
6. Fire up Visual Studio and run the Rockit project.

You can technically run a newer version of the Rockit SDK than your production server, you just have to force it to run all the Rock migrations to update the database after you restore.

Actions

There are a number of options that can be performed on your database. Many of them require you to select your RockWeb folder as well. This doesn't make any changes to the files on disk, but it is needed to properly scan the various plugins that might exist.

For a full list of actions and what each one does, head over to the wiki.