Sitecore versioning appears incorrect after package install

Question

This is using 8.1 Update 2 with multi-lingual/fallback. I've been installing packages to make updates from our local environment to our QA server. Somewhere along the line, it started to create what I'd call phantom versions. For example, in one language the version dropdown looks like it's at version 5, but when you click on the version dropdown to look at them, it only shows version 1 (which is all there should be). The publishing viewer also doesn't show multiple versions.

In addition, it's giving the "If you publish now, the selected version will not be visible on the Web site because it has been replaced by an older version." message, but when I look online, neither case suggested is happening...there's no workflow and the publish isn't set to never publish.

It seems like somewhere in here, the version counting got completely messed up, but I'm at a total loss as to why or how to fix it. I tried deleting affected items and reinstalling them via package, but it goes back to the same version number it was at before. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I had an issue dealing with versions and cloning items when using language fallback. This article mentions that it isn't solely an issue with clones:

We uncovered a bug - any time an item was created outside of the main Home item and using anything other than “Insert Item from Template” (eg. copy, clone, package installation) any item that was set as a Fallback would switch to an actual empty version of the item in all languages.

http://www.xcentium.com/blog/2016/05/11/field-fallback-in-the-new-world-of-sitecore-81

The patch I got to fix my issue was Sitecore.Support.120002. The behavior I was focused on isn't exactly the same however the dll has a processor called RemoveExtraVersions. The code in that processor checks each language of the copied item and if the latest version of the item in that language is a fallback item is removes the version from the current language. This does get added in the uiCloneItems node so it might not be exactly what you want though.

Answer 2

There are a few possible causes I can think of:

1. Web database. If you accidentally switched to the Web database, you'll only see one version, but it will be the latest.
2. Version archiving. If you have a module that is doing any type of trimming on the data, it would archive older versions and keep newer ones. This could lead to the scenario you are seeing, depending on the configuration you have for the module.
3. Item package installation. I haven't seen this in a while, but I have seen that if only a particular version was packaged up from another environment, it kept that version number when imported into another environment. So if you grabbed v5, it would be called v5 in the new environment, even though it's the first version in that new environment, because of how it is serialized.