Hi everyone, I recently filed a bug: http://jira.magnolia-cms.com/browse/MAGNOLIA-4415 which was closed as "Not an Issue". However, Jan encouraged me to post this issue to the user list for discussion, which I am now doing.
The error I posted was this: When activating, magnolia activates the content "as is", and then sets the "lastAction" metadata field on the author instance after activation. This means that the values of the "lastAction" metadata field differ between author and public instances, with the public instance always trailing "one activation behind" the author instance with respect to the "lastAction" field. We noticed this error because we use the "lastAction" field to implement sorting by publication date, and were getting different sort-order on author and public instances. Jan has proposed 2 solutions, which will work for us, but IMHO they are more workarounds than final solutions. Jan writes: "lastAction date in meta data is value meant for Magnolia internal use only and is used on author instance to keep track of performed activations" è In this case my contention is that it would be extremely useful to have a "publication-date" field that is automatically set by magnolia Jan writes: "If you want to sort content by the date I would suggest to use custom property for such values rather than value that is meant to be for internal use by activation." è In other areas of the site we do exactly this. However, this requires that the editor manually set and update the property. Sometimes this is what is wanted. Other times, this is NOT wanted, i.e. it is not desired to give the editor this control (and the opportunity to introduce errors), the content *should* be ordered by actual publication date. The solutions offered, namely using a modified ReceiveFilter or the observation module to set the lastAction field automatically on the public instances will work for us, but I consider it a workaround for the following reasons: - This still means content will differ between author and public instances. - In addition, it means content will also differ between our 2 public instances, since it can't be guaranteed that the activation will occur at the same time on both nodes. I'm wondering if anyone else had this problem, and what your solution was? Is there any way to solve this satisfactorily? Between multiple subscribers, transactional activation, versioning, workflow-activation with delays, etc... this is actually quite a tricky problem. Might it be a solution to set the lastAction field before activation, instead of afterwards? Failure to activate would leave the lastAction value "incorrect" on the author system in this case... Does anyone have any other ideas how this could be better solved? Thanks! Regards from Vienna, Richard ---------------------------------------------------------------- For list details, see http://www.magnolia-cms.com/community/mailing-lists.html Alternatively, use our forums: http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[email protected]> ----------------------------------------------------------------
