What happens exactly to a portal page when you unload it?

[wpatrickhames]

What happens exactly to a portal page when you unload it?  What I'm tasked to do it to move a dashboard from our production instance to a sandbox environment.  I've been reading how to do it via update sets, but there's always a task to "Unload the portal page from Homepage list".  Does unloading a portal page mean that I have to load it again so we can keep it in production?  I don't want to MOVE the dashboard... I just want to copy it.  Does that make sense?

[Adam Stout · Accepted solution]

While the name is not intuitive, "Unload" forces a copy of it into the active update set.  It doesn't change the instance you are looking at.

Are you really taking about homepages or dashboards?  If you are actively looking at new homepages, I recommend you look at converting to Dashboards as soon as possible. 

[wpatrickhames]

Thanks for your answer, Adam.  That's what I was hoping it was doing and not actually unloading it from the select-able list.  And it never gave me an option to load it back, so then I came really confused.

It's a PA dashboard that I am looking to copy into sandbox.  Thanks for the information!

[priya0895]

Hi Adam, 

  I have unloaded the dashboard and portal pages and moved to update set from production to dev. But the Reports in the portal page are not visible on the dashboard however they are present and captured in the portal. Please refer attached.  Could you please suggest why is this happening??

[Adam Stout]

That looks like the reports themselves where not in the update set but it is difficult to diagnose with just a screenshot.  Unloading grabs the layout of the dashboard, but everything else needs to be captured normally in an update set (so either create it or update it to get it in the update set).