publish related media items in Sitecore 6.5 without using workflow - sitecore

Question

Our client wants to automatically publish related media items when publishing a page. They're not using workflow which would have made things simpler, so I need to find another way. At the moment I've created a custom publish pipeline processor (as shown in this blog post) where I've enabled History storage for the web database and get the list of changed items from there. When looping through the changed items I'm checking for any related media items and publish them.
This works fine, but I just wanted to check if there's any pitfalls to watch out for or if there is a better way of doing this. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

The best way without using workflow is to replace the AddItemReferences processor in the PublishItem workflow. There you can add what types of items will be published along with the original item.
Here is a blog post Alex Shyba about it.
Here is my local implementation
public class AddItemReferences : Sitecore.Publishing.Pipelines.PublishItem.AddItemReferences
{
private readonly static ILogger _logger = AppLogger.GetNamedLogger(typeof(AddItemReferences));
protected override List<Item> GetItemReferences(PublishItemContext context)
{
Assert.ArgumentNotNull(context, "context");
var list = new List<Item>();
// calling base method which processes links from FileDropArea field
list.AddRange(base.GetItemReferences(context));
// adding our "own" related items
list.AddRange(GetRelatedReferences(context));
return list;
}
protected virtual List<Item> GetRelatedReferences(PublishItemContext context)
{
Assert.ArgumentNotNull(context, "context");
var relatedReferenceList = new List<Item>();
if (context.PublishOptions.Mode == PublishMode.SingleItem )
{
try
{
var sourceItem = context.PublishHelper.GetSourceItem(context.ItemId);
if (sourceItem.Paths.IsContentItem)
{
var itemLinks = sourceItem.Links.GetValidLinks();
ItemLink[] referers = Globals.LinkDatabase.GetReferers(sourceItem);
relatedReferenceList.AddRange(GetMediaItems(itemLinks));
relatedReferenceList.AddRange(GetAliases(referers));
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
var options = context.PublishOptions;
StringBuilder msg = new StringBuilder();
msg.AppendLine("Publishing options");
msg.AppendLine("Deep: " + options.Deep);
msg.AppendLine("From date: " + options.FromDate);
msg.AppendLine("Language: " + options.Language);
msg.AppendLine("Mode: " + options.Mode);
msg.AppendLine("PublishDate: " + options.PublishDate);
msg.AppendLine("Targets: " + string.Join(",",options.PublishingTargets.ToArray()));
msg.AppendLine("Republish all: " + options.RepublishAll);
msg.AppendLine("Root item: " + options.RootItem);
msg.AppendLine("Source database: " + options.SourceDatabase.Name);
_logger.LogError(msg.ToString(), ex);
}
}
return relatedReferenceList;
}
private static IEnumerable<Item> GetMediaItems(ItemLink[] itemLinks)
{
foreach (var link in itemLinks)
{
var item = link.GetTargetItem();
if (item == null)
continue;
if (item.Paths.IsMediaItem)
{
yield return item;
}
}
}
private static IEnumerable<Item> GetAliases(ItemLink[] referrers)
{
foreach (var link in referrers)
{
var item = link.GetSourceItem();
if (item != null && IsAlias(item))
yield return item;
}
}
private static bool IsAlias(Item item)
{
return item.TemplateID.Guid == DataAccessSettings.Templates.AliasTemplateId;
}
}

Answer 2

Input for risk areas:
Missing entries in History storage if editing session is above 30 days prior to publish
Finding related media items involves both link fields and also rich text fields, there can be possible direct links to media, these could be handled and transformed to correctly formatted links.
Alternative solutions
Depending on the Sitecore maturity of your editors another user model could be that you autopublish the media Items from the Save Pipeline. For some users this is easier to understand, since the publishing model is then restricted to handling page visibility.