Sitecore Publish Service not publishing new items

Question

I'm experimenting with the new Publish Service in a sandbox environment created with Sitecore Instance Manager. I followed the setup steps and I am able to publish individual items successfully. For example, I blanked out the Default Workflow field on the Sample Item standard values and published it successfully.

I created a new folder under Home, then tried to fill that folder with items using the FillDb.aspx page. That all worked fine, I got a pile of folders and Sample Items under that new folder. However, I cannot publish them.

I've tried Publish Site, Full Republish from the Publishing Dashboard, and clicking on my new folder and doing Publish Item with Publish Subitems checked. Neither my new folder or any of the children will publish. The publish jobs show 0 versions published, save the Full Republish which shows ~4600 items. I generated 100,000 items so that number is way low.

Any ideas what might be going on?

Answer 1

The problem here is with FillDB .. it uses quite a rough-and-ready script to make items, and so it generates items that do not have a unique revision field (it leaves this field blank so it defaults to the Standard Values field - it does this for quite a lot of the standard fields).

For the Publishing Service to publish an item it must have a valid revision field, this is why it is skipping those items. We use the revision field to track uniqueness of edits to items so we can compare edits of the same version.

What is happening is that the Publishing Service will look at the revision field and see no change (as the Standard Values item has not changed, so its revision field is still the same) and so thinks there is no work to do and skips the item(s).

Are these issues not logged in the publish service log ? If so I will raise this as a bug to provide more user feedback.

Answer 2

As Stephen pointed out, it's a shortcoming of the Fill Db tool. We're hoping to get a fix for this out in the next Sitecore release (but no promises).

In the meantime, you can use the following SQL script to 'repair' your Items.

The first script will report any Item versions that don't have a revision field.

The second script will create a revision field for all Items that don't have one.

This will then allow the Publishing Service to publish all Items correctly.

-- Report all the Versions that have no revision field
SELECT detectedVersion.*, revisionBasedVersion.*
  FROM (
    SELECT ItemId, Language, Version
    FROM VersionedFields vf
    GROUP BY ItemId, Language, Version) AS detectedVersion

LEFT OUTER JOIN (
    SELECT ItemId, Language, Version
    FROM VersionedFields
    WHERE FieldId = '8CDC337E-A112-42FB-BBB4-4143751E123F') revisionBasedVersion
        ON detectedVersion.ItemId = revisionBasedVersion.ItemId AND
           detectedVersion.Language = revisionBasedVersion.Language AND
           detectedVersion.Version = revisionBasedVersion.Version

WHERE revisionBasedVersion.ItemId IS NULL

--

-- Create a revision field for all versions that don't have one
  INSERT INTO VersionedFields (
     Id, 
     ItemId, 
     Language, 
     Version, 
     FieldId, 
     Value, 
     Created, 
     Updated)
  SELECT NEWID(), 
         detectedVersion.ItemId, 
         detectedVersion.Language, 
         detectedVersion.Version, 
         '8CDC337E-A112-42FB-BBB4-4143751E123F', 
         LOWER(CONVERT(NVARCHAR(50), NEWID())),
         GETDATE(),
         GETDATE()
  FROM (
    SELECT ItemId, Language, Version
    FROM VersionedFields vf
    GROUP BY ItemId, Language, Version) AS detectedVersion

    LEFT OUTER JOIN (
        SELECT ItemId, Language, Version
        FROM VersionedFields
        WHERE FieldId = '8CDC337E-A112-42FB-BBB4-4143751E123F') revisionBasedVersion
            ON detectedVersion.ItemId = revisionBasedVersion.ItemId AND
               detectedVersion.Language = revisionBasedVersion.Language AND
               detectedVersion.Version = revisionBasedVersion.Version

  WHERE revisionBasedVersion.ItemId IS NULL