Porting updated components and schemas, must I import twice?

Question

On a couple of occasions I've had to port some changes between our Tridion 2011 environments (using Content Porter 2009 SP2) that have involved changes to a schema and all the components that use that schema.

When doing this I sometimes have to import twice - the first time to import the schema and the second to import the components. If I try and do both at once the import fails claiming that the components won't import as the schema is invalid. This is even though I can see in the porter status window that all schemas have already successfully imported.

The most recent time this happened was when an additional mandatory field was added to the end of a schema. All components that used this schema were updated with a value for the new field and I was able to export without error. The on importing, an error was generated claiming that the content porter could not save the components as their schema was invalid. I let the content porter skip all the components and immediately re-ran the import, this time selecting only the components and not the schema. This imported without error.

Following the response below, "Synchronize content against Schema before importing" was selected.

Is it standard procedure to have to do two separate imports for this, or is there something I'm missing?

Answer 1

The way I've always worked with Content Porter is to export each publication as a single package, this prevents this issue and made managing the import a bit easier. Although does add more overhead. I'm not sure of another way around this.

I think a lot of this is fixed in newer versions (and maybe check Tridion World for a hotfix) but I still tend to work like this.