In one of our projects, the location of a few Sitecore items had to be moved to a completely different subtree. With a simple drag and drop the entire tree was moved in our development project, but how do we safely commit this action on the running production environment, without breaking any existing links to the items?
Changes on our production environment, are made with the help of Sitecore (installation) packages. A Google search did not really make clear how Sitecore would behave, when items are relocated with the help of an installation package; would it understand that the old path should be removed?
With the right settings, it turned out that moving items with an installation package is completely safe. Below I provide the 2 required steps to configure the package with the help of the Sitecore package designer.
Required step 1: Select all items
Select the entire tree of items in its new location and make sure you include all subitems.
Required step 2: Installation options
Make sure you select “Overwrite” as the action to follow when existing items are found. Any of the other options will not move the location of the tree on the targeted server.
Please note that you have included all subitems, as described earlier, otherwise only your main folder of the tree will be moved, and all child items are lost!
Install
With these settings the items should be moved on the targeted deployment instance without any problem. Existing links to the items should also be automatically updated to their new location.
Original blog location: Edwin's Journey