How to grant bucket sync permission to role

Question

I have a custom bucket that organizes items using a custom rule based on the value of a date field called "Event Start Date" on each page item.

I'm trying to give content authors the ability to manually sync the bucket because items do not bucket automatically due to the "Event Start Date" field being empty when a new page is created.

This is what I can see as a super admin:

I have made our author role a member of sitecore\Sitecore Client Bucket Management, but all the author can see is:

It still doesn't work even when I grant specific permissions on the item in question (this is the security viewer):

As a side note, I'm not finding much information on this anywhere. Is the standard practice to auto sync buckets on save or item add events?

Answer 1

Reviewing the code for this ribbon button (Sitecore.Buckets.Commands.SyncBucket in the Sitecore.Buckets.dll) reveals that the user must be an Administrator to have access to this button:

public override CommandState QueryState(CommandContext context)
{
    Error.AssertObject(context, "context");
    Item items = context.Items[0];
    BucketSecurityManager bucketSecurityManager = new BucketSecurityManager(items);
    if (items.Appearance.ReadOnly)
    {
        return CommandState.Disabled;
    }
    if (!items.Locking.HasLock() && !Context.User.IsAdministrator)
    {
        return CommandState.Disabled;
    }
    if (items.Locking.IsLocked() && !items.Locking.HasLock())
    {
        return CommandState.Disabled;
    }
    if (!bucketSecurityManager.IsAllowedToCreateBucket)
    {
        return CommandState.Disabled;
    }
    if (!items.IsBucketItemCheck())
    {
        return CommandState.Disabled;
    }
    return CommandState.Enabled;
}

Next steps

You could theoretically override this behavior by creating a subclass of SyncBucket and overriding the QueryState method to evaluate your own security rules, then add a patch config to update the class used for the item:syncbucket command to use your custom class instead.

Note: a better solution, however, is to automatically sync the items as they are updated (using something like this solution), instead of requiring authors to manually click the Sync button.

For the curious: How to find the above information?

I reviewed the security for the Sync button in the ribbon by following the below steps:

1. Find the ribbon button in the core database (/sitecore/content/Applications/Content Editor/Ribbons/Chunks/Item Buckets/Sync)
2. Check its security and the security of its parent
   • Its parent's security gives access to users of roles sitecore\Sitecore Client Configuring and sitecore\Sitecore Client Bucket Management

Even after granting a user access to one of those roles, however, does not allow them to click the Sync button, however, so I reviewed the code:

1. The ribbon button item in the core database has the command name item:syncbucket
2. Looking at /sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx, I found that it points to Sitecore.Buckets.Commands.SyncBucket in the Sitecore.Buckets.dll
3. In that class, I found the above QueryState method, which shows how it determines whether to enable or disable the button.

Answer 2

You can achieve this by programmatically moving the bucketed item to the root of the bucket with the BucketManager. Doing this will force it to reevaluate the bucket rules and reorganize it:

BucketManager.MoveItemIntoBucket(bucketedItem, bucketItem);

Note that this is different from BucketManager.Sync(bucketItem) because it does not sync the whole bucket, but instead handles just the single item that was changed.

In our solutions, we typically create an item:saved event handler to do this automatically:

using Sitecore.Buckets.Managers;
using Sitecore.Buckets.Util;
using Sitecore.Data;
using Sitecore.Data.Items;
using Sitecore.Events;
using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Custom.Events.ItemSaved
{
    public class ReorganizeBucketedItemInBucket
    {
        public void OnItemSaved(object sender, EventArgs args)
        {
            var bucketedItem = Event.ExtractParameter(args, 0) as Item;

            // If we don't have an item or we're not saving in the master DB, ignore this save
            if (bucketedItem == null || !"master".Equals(bucketedItem.Database?.Name, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
                return;

            if (!bucketedItem.TemplateID.Equals(new ID("{bucketed-item-template-id}"))) return;

            var itemChanges = Event.ExtractParameter(args, 1) as ItemChanges;

            // If there were no changes or the changes didn't include the date field, ignore this save
            if (itemChanges == null || !itemChanges.HasFieldsChanged || !itemChanges.IsFieldModified(new ID("{field-id-of-date-field}")))
                return;

            Item bucketItem = bucketedItem.Axes.SelectSingleItem($"{EscapePath(bucketedItem.Paths.FullPath)}/ancestor-or-self::*[@@templateid = '{{bucket-container-template-id}}']");

            // If this item isn't in a bucket (or is in a bucket of another, unexpected type), ignore it
            if (bucketItem == null) return;

            Item parent = bucketedItem.Parent;
            BucketManager.MoveItemIntoBucket(bucketedItem, bucketItem);

            // Delete empty ancestor bucket folders
            while (parent != null && !parent.HasChildren && parent.TemplateID == BucketConfigurationSettings.BucketTemplateId)
            {
                Item tempParent = parent.Parent;
                parent.Delete();
                parent = tempParent;
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Wraps each segment of a sitecore path with "#"'s
        /// </summary>
        public string EscapePath(string path)
        {
            return Regex.Replace(path, @"([^/]+)", "#$1#").Replace("#*#", "*");
        }
    }
}

And don't forget your patch config, of course:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
    <sitecore>
        <events>
            <event name="item:saved">
                <handler type="Custom.Events.ItemSaved.ReorganizeBucketedItemInBucket, Custom.Events" method="OnItemSaved"></handler>
            </event>
        </events>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>