Display Name not changing

Question

Sitecore 8.2 update 0

I have a few items in my tree that when I try and change the display name, nothing happens. The display name stays the same. On the Audit of the change in the logs. No error.

11848 16:51:23 INFO AUDIT (sitecore\admin): Set display name: master:/sitecore/content/sites/client/settings/authors/john-doe, language: en, version: 1, id: {F808FA41-3483-4334-8DF1-CB1AD1079F56}, name: fffff

I created a brand new Sitecore site, copied over the connectionstrings.config and updated the data path. No extra configs at all. Still does it. It seems like its in the DB.

Any cache I am missing?

Update 1

Just an update that I did/do have item:saved event that updates the item name and display to convert spaces to "-".

I have opened a Sitecore ticket. I will update here if they come back with anything.

Update 2

Looking at the database I found that in UnversionedFields, I found two records for display name. One with a language and one without. The one without the language is the one being shown. The one with a language is the one being updated.

Answer 1

The main reason why this is happening to some items is that the items might be corrupted.

Try:

SELECT *
FROM [your db].[dbo].[VersionedFields]
WHERE ItemId = 'one of your funky items'
  AND FieldId = '{B5E02AD9-D56F-4C41-A065-A133DB87BDEB}'

and

SELECT *
FROM [your db].[dbo].[SharedFields]
WHERE ItemId = 'one of your funky items'
  AND FieldId = '{B5E02AD9-D56F-4C41-A065-A133DB87BDEB}'

Since __Display Name is neither versioned or shared, nothing should come up on these queries. But if I am right, something will - and you should just proceed to delete these rows.

You may also delete the row from the Unversioned result where the item is not the correct one and update the other fields like the language. Do this for only this item as a test. If it works, you may consider of updating the other corrupted items.

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29850067/unable-to-change-display-name-of-item-why

Answer 2

(I wish I could comment...but I cannot yet)

I have experienced a similar issue for one of my projects on a lower environment using Sitecore 6.6. The fact that this issue occurred on one single environment (and not in production or other lower environments) seems to confirm what Pete suggested.

This doesn't answer your question about what it is causing this, but I was able to find a manual workaround. I recall I was able to change the display name of an item using the serialization developer tools though. Serialize the item, make a manual change in the serialized file to the display name (and to the count value of the field), revert the serialized item in Sitecore.