I need some guidance on how to properly migrate newly created Concepts, Reference Terms, and their mappings from our Demo OpenMRS server to the Test environment.
We created several new concepts and reference terms on Demo, and mapped them correctly. Now we want to transfer these exact items to our Test server.
My questions are:
1. What is the recommended way to export/import concepts from one OpenMRS instance to another?
Metadata Sharing module?
Initializer (Iniz) CSV export/import?
Concept Dictionary export?
2. Should we export just the concepts, or also the reference terms?
3. Is there a reliable method to ensure that UUIDs remain consistent between Demo and Test after import?
If anyone has a clean workflow or best practices for transferring a batch of concepts and reference terms between servers, I would greatly appreciate your advice.
Currently, we don’t have a recommended pathway to migrate concepts between OpenMRS instances, or at least not without caveats.
Metadata Sharing mostly allows you to select concept content and will export it correctly, but because it exports a representation of the database rows, it tends to depend on having a single “central” metadata definition server, which should usually not be used instance of OpenMRS.
You can export to Iniz CSVs, but we don’t have any pre-built tooling for doing this.
Generally, our recommendation these days would be create the concepts in Open Concept Lab and import them into OpenMRS from there.
This is a question only you can answer, but you probably should.
Most of the export methods I mentioned will preserve concept UUIDs, though for Iniz CSVs your exporter would need to handle that…
Thanks a lot for your answer. Actually, we tried once before sharing the metadata, and we faced a problem; now I realize why we encountered that issue.
About the second option, Iniz CSVs, it was exactly the one I was working on yesterday.