Skip to main content

Demystifying Workflow, Blueprint, Publish and Actions You Can do With Such Items

I was playing around a while ago with some Components in Workflow, in Blueprinted situation, when I noticed some strange behaviour.

I was trying to place a v0.x Component (in Workflow) on a Page in a child Publication -- can't do.
I was publishing a Component linking to a Component in Workflow. It works, but it will use the values from the last saved 'link-to' Component -- makes sense. But even when publishing with ActivateBlueprint=true, still the last major version of the 'link-to' Component was used.

This all triggered me to summarize these weird cases, as follows:

  • A _new_ Component (version 0.x) in workflow:
    • is visible in its own and child Publications (GUI & API);
    • can be published in its own and/or child Publication (GUI & API using the “ActivateWorkflow” flag). Publishing follows most of the rules we know (DCPs get published, Page republished if published previously), but some don’t actually work as expected: Components “linking-to” the Component in workflow will see the ‘last checked-in’ version of the Component in workflow;
    • can be put on a Page as CP:
      • in its own Publication – (GUI & API);
      • in child Publication – only API (because minor version new Component is not visible in GUI’s CP selector);
  • An _existing_ Component does all the above (it can even be put on a Page in a child Publication both in GUI and API)


Note: Be careful with the implications of placing a v0.x of a Component on a Page: you are responsible for cleaning up the Page (remove CP, unpublish Page, delete Page), in case you reject the Component (or if you abort the Workflow Process). If you don't, then Tridion will throw an error that the Component is used and cannot be deleted -- which makes perfect sense...

Comments

Nivlong said…
Context matters! Minor component versions not being available for pages CPs is seemingly subtle, but significant behavior. It makes sense, though. As a content author, I'd expect to see the last approved version of a component. Thanks for clarifying, Mihai--great post!

I imagine that clean up step gets more complicated the more we add to the page or link components. Deleting a "used" item aint easy!
Unknown said…
can we publish the minor version(v0.x) of Component only in workflow. when i tried it was not publishing, it is publishing only the major version of the component. please let me know if it is possible to publish minor version.
Mihai Cădariu said…
Yes, Sunil. It is possible. In the GUI, you have to publish the minor version Component from the workflow screens (or in Tridion 2013, with publish option "If possible, publish the in-workflow version of an item").

Using the TOM API, you will need to publish with a ResolveInstruction that has property IncludeWorkflow set to true.

Popular posts from this blog

Toolkit - Dynamic Content Queries

This post if part of a series about the  File System Toolkit  - a custom content delivery API for SDL Tridion. This post presents the Dynamic Content Query capability. The requirements for the Toolkit API are that it should be able to provide CustomMeta queries, pagination, and sorting -- all on the file system, without the use third party tools (database, search engines, indexers, etc). Therefore I had to implement a simple database engine and indexer -- which is described in more detail in post Writing My Own Database Engine . The querying logic does not make use of cache. This means the query logic is executed every time. When models are requested, the models are however retrieved using the ModelFactory and those are cached. Query Class This is the main class for dynamic content queries. It is the entry point into the execution logic of a query. The class takes as parameter a Criterion (presented below) which triggers the execution of query in all sub-criteria of a Criterio

A DD4T.net Implementation - Custom Binary Publisher

The default way to publish binaries in DD4T is implemented in class DD4T.Templates.Base.Utils.BinaryPublisher and uses method RenderedItem.AddBinary(Component) . This produces binaries that have their TCM URI as suffix in their filename. In my recent project, we had a requirement that binary file names should be clean (without the TCM URI suffix). Therefore, it was time to modify the way DD4T was publishing binaries. The method in charge with publishing binaries is called PublishItem and is defined in class BinaryPublisher . I therefore extended the BinaryPublisher and overrode method PublishItem. public class CustomBinaryPublisher : BinaryPublisher { private Template currentTemplate; private TcmUri structureGroupUri; In its simplest form, method PublishItem just takes the item and passes it to the AddBinary. In order to accomplish the requirement, we must specify a filename while publishing. This is the file name part of the binary path of Component.BinaryConten

Scaling Policies

This post is part of a bigger topic Autoscaling Publishers in AWS . In a previous post we talked about the Auto Scaling Groups , but we didn't go into details on the Scaling Policies. This is the purpose of this blog post. As defined earlier, the Scaling Policies define the rules according to which the group size is increased or decreased. These rules are based on instance metrics (e.g. CPU), CloudWatch custom metrics, or even CloudWatch alarms and their states and values. We defined a Scaling Policy with Steps, called 'increase_group_size', which is triggered first by the CloudWatch Alarm 'Publish_Alarm' defined earlier. Also depending on the size of the monitored CloudWatch custom metric 'Waiting for Publish', the Scaling Policy with Steps can add a difference number of instances to the group. The scaling policy sets the number of instances in group to 1 if there are between 1000 and 2000 items Waiting for Publish in the queue. It also sets the