I'm trying to understand the expected author experience in Page Editor when working with multiple versions of pages. If an author sets the date on the Experience tab to set a page in the future, it sticks and stays that way when opening other pages in Page Editor. We have authors who are opening the page in Page Editor and not seeing the content they expect because of the date setting. Is it expected that they have to manually manage this date when going from page to page? This seems very cumbersome.
More specific info: The specific issue we're having has to do with the fact that there appears to be no way to reset the button back to its default ( automatically showing the current date/time on each page load). If you manually set it back to "now" it sticks at that point in time. We have situations where authors attempt to get back to "now" by setting the date/time to the current date/time. This works for that moment, but then when they make a change to a page (causing a new version to be created with the current date/time as it's publishing restriction) and save, they're changes appear to disappear on save because the "now" they manually set in Page Editor is no longer now.
We're in the middle or rolling out workflow and this scenario is causing mass confusion with our authors.
Is there a way to reset it to automatic? Could I somehow create a custom button to do this?
My understanding is this feature works this way to allow you to preview the site and navigate it around it as if it was another date in the future. If you had to reset it every time you went to a new page, that flow would be very cumbersome.
You are just finding the other side of the cumbersome because it is being used for an alternative flow.
Related
I'm working in HCL Notes application. I have developed a summary view to show calculated figures to the user. Then the user clicks one of the action buttons and I open a detailed view, but for that view I setup Selection Formula on the fly so that it shows the records filtered specific to that button conditions. It was working almost fine for a few days, but now most of the time it shows some previously shown (filtered) data no matter what button the user has clicked. Means it doesn't set the Selection Formula of the view and shows the view with the old formula and it won't get back to normal condition even if they restart Notes application.
When the user is stuck in this particular condition, and they peep through the status bar it shows this message:
Document has been modified or corrupted since signed! (data).
The necessary code-snippet is as below:
*Set dtlView = db.GetView("Report_Dtl")
dtlView.SelectionFormula =formula
Call dtlView.Refresh()*
where formula is the dynamically built formula. Looks like the line
dtlView.SelectionFormula =formula
is unable to update the selection formula and then the line below generates the above error message:
Call uidb.OpenView(dtlView.Name,,False, False)
Please help!
Thanks
For "on the fly" modification of the view selection formula your user need "Designer"- access to the database, and that is never a good idea. The help document to the function you are using is explicitly stating that this is not a good idea (emphasise of mine):
This is not a good way to display a selected set of documents for a specific user. When you use this property to change the view selection, it applies to all users of the view.
There are problems with using this method to make a view display a new selection of documents for an end user:
Do not give end-users Designer access to an application.
If it is a shared view, users will interfere with each other's searches.
The Notes® client caches design information, and there's no way to tell it to update its cache (except for outlines). Exiting and re-entering the application usually works, but it's hard to programmatically ensure the user exited the application entirely.
In addition the modification of the view selection formula can break the signature of the design element and then other errors occur.
Better use another approach:
Use a Folder for every user and put the selected documents in there (after doing a NotesDatabase.Search with the formula
Use a separate view for every user and let a server agent manipulate its selection formula with a user that has access.
For having a separate view / folder for every user you could use "Shared, Private on first use"- views (they are not easy to maintain), or any process that generates them and is able to assign every view to the users they belong to... in both cases this needs some effort, but at least it will work.
The way that Page Editor handles versions has been causing issues for in one of our Sitecore solutions for a client. I've posted about them here:
Sitecore instance showing incorrect workflow state in Page Editor
Expected usage of Page Editor's Experience date
I didn't get much response on those and so far I've surmised that this is just how Sitecore works. This is less than ideal for our instance, as when publishing restrictions are set, authors don't know which version they're editing which is causing various issues for them.
I'd like to implement a solution(s) to improve the experience provide the following functionality:
Something in the Experience tab that shows the number of the version being viewed.
A button on the Experience tab that resets the Date to the default (this is not simply setting the date to the current date/time, but resetting it to act as it did before a date was manually set).
A custom button in Content Editor which allows an author to open a specific version in Page Editor...set the date automatically when it opens, I guess.
An any one give me some clues on how much of this is possible and where to start?
Thanks.
For the first bullet "Something in the Experience tab that shows the number of the version being viewed", you can add version item in Core database.
Move to "Core" DB in Desktop Mode
Navigate to "/sitecore/content/Applications/WebEdit/Ribbons/WebEdit/Experience/"
Create "Versions" item like this, http://imgur.com/bPEDm7R
Create "Compare" item under "Versions" like this, http://imgur.com/dG8dz2M
The result like this, http://imgur.com/HPu3XAL
The content author can see which version they are using and they can also compare with previous versions.
We've been noticing an increase in number of broken links on our sitecore website.
Some it is due to
User Training
Publishing Issues (linked page is not yet published)
Maybe content editor issues
It's been hard to verify some of these but sometimes the link might have the authoring page URL (which means someone didn't follow the SOP), sometimes they have a strange url like /shell/Content Editor/...
So we are trying to proactively fix these before the pages go live.
I had a couple ideas like writing a Handler that would look through all "Rich Text Fields" and looking for inconsistencies (like authoring server URL). Also using a crawler-type of validator could help us (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Description) but we were wondering what the community was doing to address this issue.
The "internal link checker" usually works well but doesn't detect many of this erroneous setups (as I believe it sees them as 'external links').
Your input is greatly appreciated!
If you have RichText fields and create internal links, your internal link looks like this in the HTML view: "a href="~/link.aspx?_id=EB3AD128E7BF4F3C9F3812F701D7724E&_z=z" and when you hover with your mouse over it, is show "/Sitecore/Shell/Controls/Rich Text Editor/" before the ~/link.aspx. This is normal behavior. This link is modified to a normal link during rendering of the RTE field.
However, be sure to use the Sitecore controls like to render these RTE fields and to render links. Also using sc:fld() in XSLT instead of sc:field() can create strange links because sc:fld is rendering the raw value of the field.
In all of the Sitecore projects I have been working on, I didn't have much issues with broken links.
There is a known bug with copy-pasting links from a rich text editor, where path info is appended to the link (generating the /shell/Content Editor/ stuff).
Sitecore have a fix for it here:
http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%206/ReleaseNotes/KnownIssues%20Recommended/Copying%20and%20pasting%20link%20in%20rt%20fields%20may%20break%20the%20link.aspx
I would suggest a new Validation Action added to the workflow command before the items are finalized. Then you could actively stop them from being published and give immediate feedback. If you're not using workflows, you could add a new item level validator, but those often get ignored in my experience -- too many false positives on the existing validators.
I have a few fields that I don't want to appear in the report. Is there a way to hide them completely (not even show the column header for these fields)?
I tried to create my own ISaveAction with the intent to filter out those fields before they get saved to the DB, but even if they don't appear in the AdaptedResultList that is sent to the DataManager.InsertForm the columns associated to these fields still appear in the reports.
Out of the box functionality, the answer is that if you mean one of the reports in the Form Reports area of WFFM, you most likely can, depending on the report. If you mean one of the reports that you can see a "Design" button on top when you view it, then you know that it's using the report that is configured in one of the .mrt files in your website directory in this path:
Website\sitecore modules\Shell\Web Forms for Marketers\Reports
Editing one of the reports by hitting the Design button will open up the Stimulsoft designer that is built in to Sitecore and you can make changes. You can also download one of the trial clients from the Stimulsoft website and open the .mrt files directly and edit them that way (the interface is WAY nicer than the built in Sitecore one).
A word of caution, however, BACK UP THE FILE FIRST!!! The Stimulsoft interface is picky and easy to break and it's got a learning curve. Once you figure out the basics though, removing a field is cake.
I have several Sitecore items (whose template is connected to an approval workflow) that will not go into Edit mode when clicking "Edit" from the "Review" tab. The same workflow is used elsewhere on the site successfully (the site is more than 3 years old), but clicking Edit in this case doesn't seem to affect the workflow state.
I've turned on verbose logging, which provides a lot of detail, but nothing to indicate any error conditions. I've been comparing how this template is configured with other "working" templates for a couple of days and everything looks Kosher, but surely I'm missing something obvious.
EDIT: The item(s) in question are imported by a data provider, and I've confirmed that for some reason Sitecore is not setting the "Workflow" and "State" system standard fields with a default value. That appears to be at least part of the issue.
EDIT 2: Followed the steps in this thread http://sdn.sitecore.net/Forum/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=45991 to use Sitecore Rocks to update all of the items to the correct Workflow State, but the update did not stick. For some reason workflow changes are not persisted for imported items.
EDIT 3: Clicking the Edit dropdown button under the Home tab displays the message "The item is currently not part of a workflow."
Standard values set correctly? Only have one Standard Values item for this template?
Generally, almost every time I run into a situation where X works on certain items, but not on others... it's a permissions issue. You've tested this as an Administrator I hope?
Sorry my suggestions are so vague, but it's hard to be specific here. We need some more information from you... When you click on Edit what exactly are you expecting to happen? I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "Edit mode" here. In Content Editor, all items are essentially in edit mode all the time... In my configuration, when I click on Edit, I am just locking the item. It does not change workflow state or create a new version.
These items are coming from a data provider... is your data provider handling Lock/Unlock calls properly? I know it's possible to use a data provider without implementing the entire Item API.