Migrate plain text field to Portable Text
Migration script to convert plain text to block content across your content lake
By Knut Melvær
convertToPortableText.js
/* eslint-disable no-console */
import client from 'part:@sanity/base/client'
// length(description) returns null if description isn't a (Portable Text) array
const fetchDocuments = () =>
client.fetch(`*[_type == 'post' && length(description) == null][0...100] {_id, _rev, description}`)
const buildPatches = docs =>
docs.map(doc => ({
id: doc._id,
patch: {
set: {description: [
{
"style": "normal",
"_type": "block",
"children": [
{
"_type": "span",
"marks": [],
"text": doc.description
}
],
markDefs: []
}
]},
// this will cause the migration to fail if any of the documents has been
// modified since it was fetched.
ifRevisionID: doc._rev
}
}))
const createTransaction = patches =>
patches.reduce((tx, patch) => tx.patch(patch.id, patch.patch), client.transaction())
const commitTransaction = tx => tx.commit()
const migrateNextBatch = async () => {
const documents = await fetchDocuments()
const patches = buildPatches(documents)
if (patches.length === 0) {
console.log('No more documents to migrate!')
return null
}
console.log(
`Migrating batch:\n %s`,
patches.map(patch => `${patch.id} => ${JSON.stringify(patch.patch)}`).join('\n')
)
const transaction = createTransaction(patches)
await commitTransaction(transaction)
return migrateNextBatch()
}
migrateNextBatch().catch(err => {
console.error(err)
process.exit(1)
})NOTE: We have shipped content migration tooling for Sanity (v3.27.0) that makes the approach described here. Check out the documentation and cheat sheet for learning how to do this with the proper tooling.
This script queries all documents that match the GROQ filter and builds transactions of 100 patches to convert a plain text field (description) to Portable Text. It takes the text string and places it inside a span of a block.
You can run this script with sanity exec --with-user-token convertToPortableText.js from your command line inside the studio folder.
Contributor

Knut Melvær
Knut is a principal developer marketing manager at Sanity.io
Norway