Skip to main content

Old versions of Sitecore pages get updated in SXA Site

We have recently upgraded our Sitecore form Sitecore 8.2 to Sitecore 10.1 and have migrated vanilla Sitecore sites to SXA sites. So far so good! Then what's the problem?

THE PROBLEM

One random day, a content author (lets name him GhanSingh) opened a page in Experience Editor, edited it and then saved it. May be he didn't like his changes and he thought of checking older versions of the page. He went to the page in the Content Editor and tried to check old versions of the page and to his surprise he saw something like this - 

Image


Do you notice how older versions of the page also show same Statistics data (last modified date, last modified by etc.) as the most recent version. In fact, the content author thought his actions has created multiple versions of the page and he has no way of reverting back to older versions as he don't see them anymore in the drop down. Any guesses what caused it?

THE SOLUTION

We thought it may be some custom event handler that gets triggered on item:saved or item:saving events and needs proper refactoring to work correctly. To our surprise, we didn't find anything in custom handlers which can contribute to this. We infact disabled all the customization to find its root cause but the issue kept happening.

Next step was reproducing it on a vanilla Sitecore instance and honestly, we didn't expected it to be reproducible there and it didn't reproduce either. Then we installed SXA on vanilla Sitecore instance and tried to reproduce the problem but the problem didn't reproduce.

As a next step, we started decompiling the Sitecore dlls to find all points that touch item:saving, item:saved etc. events. We started finding some potential culprits but we needed more evidence to be sure.

We enabled History Engine in Sitecore to get more details about the issue (if you are not familiar with it, I will be talking about it in a post soon) and that's where I found a stack trace referring to the following handler -

Sitecore.XA.Foundation.Publication.EventHandlers.FlagPublishingGroupingItems


This handler has an OnItemSaved() method which finds all the referrers of the saved item and if the referrer is not a SXA site page, it updates revision data of the referrer item - 


So in our case, when this handler tried to get referrers of datasource item that we edited on page in EE, it got all the older versions of page also as the datasource item was being used in older versions as well. Since our pages don't inherit SXA Page template available at - /sitecore/templates/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Content/Page, the handler logic cannot identify our vanilla Sitecore site pages as a SXA site page. Due to this, handler ended up updating revision data or statistics field values for older versions of the page as well.  

I checked the history of this handler because this seemed to be something newly introduced and found that this handler was implemented as a fix for an issue reported in previous SXA versions. 


This handler can be enabled/disabled based on following setting - 

<setting name="XA.Foundation.Publishing.FlagPublishingGroupingItems.Enabled" value="true" />

Disabling this handler fixed the issue for our problem. But Sitecore support team recommended to keep this handler enabled if we use Sitecore Publishing Service which we do.

So the only possible way was to make sure this handler doesn't update revision for our pages. This could be achieved by making sure that our base page template inherits the SXA page template at - 
/sitecore/templates/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Content/Page

Doing this fixed our issue.

THE VERDICT
If you have a site or page created outside SXA and if you migrate or move it to SXA site, make sure your page inherits SXA base page (/sitecore/templates/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Content/Page). If not, you are likely to face issues that we faced as your page wont be identified by SXA logics as a page as it doesnt inherit - /sitecore/templates/Foundation/Experience Accelerator/Multisite/Content/Page.

Hope you find this helpful!
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Sitecore PowerShell Script to create all language versions for an item from en version

  We have lots of media items and our business wants to copy the data from en version of media item to all other language versions defined in System/Languages. This ensures that media is available in all the languages. So, we created the below powershell script to achieve the same -  #Get all language versions defined in System/Languages $languages = Get-ChildItem /sitecore/System/Languages -recurse | Select $_.name | Where-Object {$_.name -ne "en"} | Select Name #Ensuring correct items are updated by comparing the template ID  $items = Get-ChildItem -Path "/sitecore/media library/MyProjects" -Recurse | Where-Object {'<media item template id>' -contains $_.TemplateID} #Bulk update context to improve performance New-UsingBlock (New-Object Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext) { foreach($item in $items){    foreach($language in $languages){ $languageVersion = Get-Item -Path $item.Paths.Path -Language $language.Name #Check if language versi
Read more

Export Sitecore media library files to zip using SPE

If you ever require to export Sitecore media files to zip (may be to optimize them), SPE (Sitecore Powershell Extension) has probably the easiest way to do this for you. It's as easy as the below 3 steps -  1. Right click on your folder (icons folder in snap)>Click on Scripts> Click on Download 2. SPE will start zipping all the media files placed within this folder. 3. Once zipping is done, you will see the Download option in the next screen. Click Download Zip containing the media files within is available on your local machine. You can play around with the images now. Hope this helps!! Like and Share ;)
Read more

Make Sitecore instance faster using Roslyn Compiler

When we install the Sitecore instance on local, the first load is slow. After each code deploy also, it takes a while for the Sitecore instance to load and experience editor to come up. For us, the load time for Sitecore instance on local machines was around 4 minutes. We started looking for ways to minimize it and found that if we update our Web.config to use Roslyn compiler and include the relevant Nugets into the project, our load times will improve. We followed the simple steps - Go to the Project you wish to add the NuGet package and right click the project and click 'Manage NuGet Packages'. Make sure your 'Package Source' is set to nuget.org and go to the 'Browse' Tab and search Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform. Install whichever version you desire, make sure you note which version you installed. You can learn more about it  here . After installation, deploy your project, make sure the Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.d
Read more

Experience of a first time Sitecore MVP

The Journey I have been working in Sitecore for almost 10 years now. When I was a beginner in Sitecore, I was highly impressed by the incredible community support. In fact, my initial Sitecore learning path was entirely based on community written blogs on Sitecore. During a discussion with my then technology lead Neeraj Gulia , he proposed the idea that I should start giving back to developer community whenever I get chance. Just like I have been helped by many developers via online blogs, stackoverflow etc., I should also try to help others. Fast forward a few years and I met  Nehemiah Jeyakumar  (now an MVP). He had a big archive of his technical notes in the form Sitecore blogs. I realized my first blog dont have to be perfect and it can be as simple as notes to a specific problem for reference in future. That's when I probably created my first blog post on Sitecore. At that time, I didn't knew about the Sitecore MVP program. Over the years, I gained more confidence to write
Read more

Clean Coding Principles in CSharp

A code shall be easy to read and understand. In this post, I am outlining basic principles  about clean coding after researching through expert recommended books, trainings and based on my experience. A common example to start with is a variable declaration like - int i  The above statement did not clarify the purpose of variable i. However,  the same variable can be declared as -  int pageNumber The moment we declared the variable as int pageNumber, our brain realized that the variable is going to store the value for number of pages. We have set the context in our brain now and it is ready to understand what the code is going to do next with these page numbers. This is one of the basic advantages of clean coding. Reasons for clean coding -  • Reading clean code is easier - Every code is revisited after certain amount of time either by the same or different developer who created it. In both the cases, if the code is unclean, its difficult to understand and update it. • To avoid s
Read more