One of my colleagues just had a problem with their Portal server, when they were attempting to migrate the data out of Cloudscape to DB2 using the wpsconfig database-transfer-export command.

The error she got was:

BUILD FAILED

C:/WebSphere/PortalServer/config/wpconfig.xml:23:
taskdef class com.ibm.wps.depcheck.PortalValidationAntTask cannot be found

I did some searching and found some PMRs in the system which described problems people had with things like their wpconfig.properties file being accidently converted from ASCII to Unicode (probably by the application they were using to edit the file), thus rendering it unreadable by the wpsconfig task.

As it turned out, this was not exactly the problem my colleague had… her problem was that the wpconfig.properties file was not actually in the config directory !!! We suspect it had accidently been dragged-and-dropped to another folder in Windows Explorer (I’ve done this myself many times in the past !).

So, the symptoms match… if the config task can’t read the wpconfig.properties file (or can’t even find it !!!!), then you might see that PortalValidationAntTask error.