Navigation breaks with Strapi export/import

[unsalted]

We do a semi regular export from our production environment, and then import in our staging environment with the new Strapi import/export feature.

The navigation structure copies, but the content-type and menu relations are missing.
The impact is we can't use our staging environment for testing because navigation is broken.

strapi-plugin-navigation: 2.4
strapi: 4.8

[unsalted]

Per a recommendation from Strapi:
"the relational linking tables that holds relational information possibly was not imported but it would depend on how the plugin was developed and how it injects the relations and if they are polymorphic or not." I haven't found time to dive deep in how the relations are managed in this plugin, but we had this issue on imports to new databases, and copies alike.

[cyp3rius]

Hello @unsalted ,

Strapi is right here, we've got custom relations made to handle entities properly in multiple navigations. Let me dig into the import - export functionality of Strapi and see how we can fix this issue on our end.

[cyp3rius]

@unsalted I've did couple of tests and seems the issue been found.

I’ve checked in deep and exported data are correct, as well the imported relations & links are proper except one thing. After import the navigations_items_related.related_id is broken because the related content type id does not match. For example in export file I've got api::page.page with id:1 but after import the same entity got id:2 and in navigations_items_related the related_id stays 1 and is not updated to 2.

What I did is the import on a same database without cleaning up any indexing so counting is continued on every table. That many imports I did it always increase the id of my api::page.page entity but relation_id stays unchanged.

With a fresh database import works perfectly. I've notified Strapi about that case, because seems it's a non handled corner case for import / export. Please try to import on the clear database schema and you'll see it works.

[derrickmehaffy]

@cyp3rius do you think it's due to the sequence not being restarted on the target table before we reimport the data?

[cyp3rius]

Might be. I've reproduced the same thing couple of times with exact same result.

[derrickmehaffy]

Odd that the actual data tables work but the relational joining tables don't. When testing with normal content-types and relations I'm not able to reproduce the issue 🤔

[derrickmehaffy]

DEITS is designed to map the entries for the new IDs automatically and handle the linking

[cyp3rius]

Indeed, I've tested with relations done from the UI interface and typical content types - works. Possibly, but I'm not sure - the plugin content types and relations are injected to DB earlier than the content type from Content Manager and are not re-iterated once ID change.

Clear & new DB - No issues, as re-iteration is not necessary.

[derrickmehaffy]

I haven't looked at the code for this plugin in a -really- long time, let me see how you are are injecting them.

[derrickmehaffy]

I'm guessing that's designed for custom polymorphic relationships?