Deprecated Sitecore Field Conversions

June 08, 2012

So while preparing my Sitecore system for a future upgrade to 6.5 I noticed that there were a lot of fields that were using deprecated field types. It's not a surprise since the original system was built on 5.3 but it's one of those things that's easily overlooked. It can seem daunting at first to update all the templates on a running system but the field types have more to do with how the fields are managed than whether or not the data gets removed from the database. The good news is that the deprecated fields all have an analogous field that it can be upgraded to easily. Well, except the server file field, which I have not found any matching field for but that's probably not being used by anyone but Sitecore. Here's what I've come up with as a cheatsheet that should speed up your upgrade a bit.

Conversion Fields:

  • html => Rich Text
  • link => General Link
  • lookup => Droplink
  • memo => Multi-Line Text
  • reference => Droptree
  • server file => I have no idea. If you use this field you'd know better than me
  • text => Single Line Text
  • tree => Droptree
  • treelist => Treelist
  • valuelookup => Droplist

So there really aren't many and like I mentioned before changing these types will only change how you interface with the stored data. It won't change the data until you edit the field. As a disclaimer, I changed and tested them locally before I pushed them live and I'd recommend the same to anyone attempting this. Please backup your db's first too, just in case.