Roles are missing from Role Manager. How would I restore the roles for the newer version?

Question

My client has fairly recently upgraded their Sitecore from 7.2 to 8.1 Update 3. They are using EXM. We realized today that many of the newer Sitecore 8 roles are missing from Role Manager (which is kept in the Core database as part of the ASP.NET membership provider).

I know I can Serialize and Revert from the file system through Role Manager. However, my client has hundreds of additional roles created that I don't want to get rid of.

I have a vanilla 8.1 U3 instance where I can grab the roles from.

So really two questions:

1. Does Revert All Roles (from file system) delete roles that aren't in the file system?

   • UPDATE #1: Turns out Revert does delete roles. (From my sandbox Sitecore instance)

   2. Is there a recommended Best Approach for moving roles from my Vanilla 8.1 U3 site to the Client implementation?

Answer 1

From the vanilla instance it should be easy to package up the Roles you are missing and then just install that package on your client instance. I have had to do that before. Packaging roles is nice and simple.

Answer 2

You could Serialize your existing roles before copying the Serialized 8.1 roles over (making sure you don't replace), that way when you Revert you won't lose any of your existing roles.