Safely replacing all references to an Rendering with another

Question

I have a controller rendering which is referenced by the standard values on most of my page templates and I need to substitute it everywhere it is used to use a different controller rendering instead.

I want to do this in a safe way without deleting the item. I know I could delete it and then use the Sitecore out of the box 'linke to another item' option that is given in the popup when confirming the delete. However I want to keep my existing item for the time being.

I have seen posts such as this: https://community.sitecore.net/technical_blogs/b/sitecorejohn_blog/posts/programmatically-update-layout-details-with-the-sitecore-asp-net-cms

But I wondered if there is an easier/better/safer way to do this.

Also I know I need to consider both the Renderings and Final renderings fields as I using Sitecore 8.1 update 2.

-- Update --

Additional information is that the rendering in question is synced with Unicorn to Staging and Prod so the solution here needs to account for this item existing in other environments. Ideally I'd do it once locally and unicorn would track the changes and push the change out to Staging and Production. One issue though is that we don't have all content locally and we don't sync content with unicorn (just templates, layouts etc).

Answer 1

There are OOTB options. Take a look at this answer here.

Removing all references to an item using OOTB tools

All of the proposed answers will require you to (temporarily) delete the item and rely on Sitecore's remapping tool. But you won't lose your rendering.

As far as safe goes; it's the safest way I can think of. And requires no coding.

Answer 2

If you have to replace everything, take the existing rendering and have it point to the new controller class. Then, create a new rendering using the old controller class and make that available to use in your placeholders.

Answer 3

You can call me crazy, but this is how I would solve this problem.

I implemented a solution for you.

Skip operations in Sitecore. If you need to sync all changes into unicorn eventually and update other environments then do your job there (on the disk not in the databse).

$OLD_RENDERING_ID = "DCEE78E1-1843-5456-A13A-F10A12191630"
$NEW_RENDERING_ID = "87182F78-4399-5896-8D59-9D6A45282F8A"

$SERIALIZATION_FOLDER = "c:\your\serialization\"

function Replace-Rendering($item){
    Write-Host $item
    $oldValue = [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($_.FullName)
    $newValue = $oldValue  -replace $OLD_RENDERING_ID,$NEW_RENDERING_ID
    [System.IO.File]::WriteAllText($item.FullName, $newValue)
}

gci -Path $SERIALIZATION_FOLDER -r |
    ? { $_.Extension -eq ".yml" } |
    ? { [System.IO.File]::ReadAllText($_.FullName).Contains($OLD_RENDERING_ID) -eq $true } |
    % { Replace-Rendering $_ }

Pros:

• You don't have to remove old rendering
• You don't need to care about missing item references in link database if you are using Sitecore relink solution
• You have got full control. You can see immediately what and where is changed before you change anything in database (dirty state is not in database)

Note:

My code is not bullet proof. It will probably change the ID on the old Rendering item as well, you can revert changes manually.

I wanted to keep solution as clean as possible thus I skipped unnecessary if/else.