Sitecore Publishing Service - Publishing Sub Items of Related Items

Background

We ran into an issue with our Sitecore 9.1 and Publishing Service 4.0 environment where when a page item with a rendering was being published, the corresponding data source of the rendering was not published fully.

To be more specific, if the rendering referred to a data source item that had multiple levels of items, then only the root of the data source was being published but not the child items.

A good example would be a navigation rendering that had a data source item with a lot of children. Content authors were making updates to all the link items within Experience Editor, but they were not being published.

This was happening for both manual publishing and publishing through workflow.

Configuration Updates

In our research, we discovered that publishing service allows you to specify the templates of the items you wish to publish as descendants of related items. 

Adding the following node to sc.publishing.relateditems.xml did trick (after a restart):

It is very important to note that the the template nodes need to have unique names in order for this to work. 

In other words: DatasourceTemplate1, DatasourceTemplate2, DatasourceTemplate3 etc. 

So as you can imagine, if you want to include a lot of data source item templates, the list in your configuration can get extremely large!

Final Words

I hope that this information helps developers who face a similar issue, as I could not find anything online about this related publishing configuration.

As always, feel free to comment or reach me on Slack or Twitter if you have any questions.                                                    

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Sitecore PowerShell Extensions - Find Content Items Missing From Sitecore Indexe

Over the course of the last month, we ran into data inconsistencies between what was in our content databases compared to our Solr indexes.

We have content authors from around the globe and content creation happens around the clock by authors via the Experience Editor and imports via external sources.

Illegal Characters Causing Index Issues

As mentioned by this KB article https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/592127, index documents are submitted Solr in XML format, and if your content contains and “illegal” characters that cannot be converted to XML, all documents in the batch submission will fail.  

When you perform an index rebuild or re-index a portion of your tree, Sitecore will submit 100 documents in a batch to Solr. How is the related to the character issue? If you perform an index rebuild and have a single bad character in one of your items in the batch, none of the 100 docs in that batch will make it into your Solr index. 

What makes this especially difficult to troubleshoot is that item batches contain different items every time. So, what could be missing from your index during one rebuild, could be different during the next rebuild.  

There is a good Stack Exchange article that explains all of this, and kudos to Anders Laub who provides a pretty decent fix for this issue: https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/questions/18832/wildly-inconsistent-index-data-after-rebuilds 

PowerShell Index Item Check Script

There are several other reasons why content could be missing from your Sitecore Indexes, and so I needed to come up with a way to identify would could be missing.

PowerShell Extensions for the win!

I decided to create a PowerShell script to do just that - check for items in a selected target database that are missing in selected index, and produce a downloadable report.

What’s nice is that I strapped on an interactive dialog making it friendly for Authors or DevOps to make their comparison selections.

If you are newish to PowerShell Extensions, this could also help you understand how powerful it truly is, and serve as a guide to build your own scripts that you can use daily!

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