Not so ready-to-replicate

One of the fab new features introduced in SiteStudio 10gR4 was the "Ready to Replicate" flag (let's call it R2R.) As discussed in some of my other posts, sections that are not marked as R2R are ignored by Archiver during the "Manage Site Replication" process - which finally makes site management a breeze. However an oddity has crept into subsequent versions of the SiteStudio component that I'd like to mention.

Dynamic Lists & the Mystery of the Missing New Item

A common misunderstanding/complaint about Dynamic Lists on SiteStudio websites is the mystery of the missing new item. An author creates a new item using the nifty "Create New Item" wizard and at the end of the wizard the author is prompted to edit or exit, and save. Once saved, the new item disappears into the ether, never to be seen again! Huh? What is going on here? Try again... same result! Meanwhile some sub-editor somewhere is getting deluged with Workflow notifications for duplicate items... help!

This situation is commonplace on systems that are using Workflow. The newly created item is whisked away to the appropriate Workflow where it cannot be searched for or accessed until it meets approval. To the author, it looks like their item has vanished into thin air because it doesn't turn up in the Dynamic List that they are trying to update. This is an unfortunate but correct behaviour of Dynamic Lists!

Dynamic Lists simply return a list of content items that match a search criteria. The trick here is that Workflow revisions are never included in search results. Most of the time users don't notice because the search service will find the latest approved revision of an item, so if their item is in Workflow but has an older approved revision, the search will find that older revision as the latest approved. The situation faced here is that there is no older approved revision - the new item is trapped in workflow at revision 1, there is no latest approved revision! It cannot be searched for and it will not show up in any Dynamic List. But the item does exist and it can be found - it is parked safely on the Workflow page.

Mystery solved? Yes. Makes the system usable? No! How do we solve this conundrum?

The first revision needs to skip Workflow so that it can turn up in search results. Sounds simple enough, except now every new content item in the system is getting released without approval! Fortunately SiteStudio has an ace up its sleeve. It uses the "DontShowInListsForWebsites" metadata field to prevent a released content item from showing up on a website.

So, the solution is to:

• Update the Dynamic List elements so that new items are created with their metadata preset to exclude them from the website;
• Update the Workflow so that the first revision of any item is immediately released only if it is excluded from a website.

Done! The new item can now be found in the Dynamic List as an "excluded" item and it doesn't show up on the website. All an author has to do is turn off the "exclude" rule and their item is instantly visible on the website. They can do so directly from the Dynamic List (there are buttons in the list element toolbar that toggle excluded items) or they can update the item's metadata as they save their changes.