Make the "Publish" and "Publish with decendants" behaviour and notifications consistent

[kieron-mcintyre]

The problem

The behaviour around publishing is inconsistent and the notifications that are raised as a result are also inconsistent. This is partly related to the decision in 13739 to roll back the feature, which I agree with - the feature wasn't solving the issue.

An example

Consider node X in the content structure that is published and that has descendants A, B, C and D, all of which are also published.

a) If I click "Publish" on node X, it will:

• Republish the node X, adding a "Published" entry to the audit trail
• Raise a ContentPublishingNotification containing a single entity for X in the PublishedEntities collection
• Raise a ContentPublishedNotification containing a single entity for X in the PublishedEntities collection

b) If instead, I select "Publish with Descendants" on the same node, it will:

• Raise a ContentPublishedNotification containing an empty PublishedEntities collection.

No ContentPublishingNotification is raised and it is not even possible to know what triggered the action because this PublishedEntities collection is empty.

This has been the behaviour in Umbraco for a long time so I am not expecting it to change. However, it is inconsistent and makes it difficult to respond to actions taken in the backoffice.

A solution

I suggest that a Umbraco:CMS:Content:PublishBehaviour setting is introduced in the appsettings that allows:

• AlwaysRepublish - "Publish with Descendants" to always republish everything and raise both Publishing and Published notifications, both including X and descendants A, B, C, and D in the PublishedEntities collection;
• AlwaysNotify - "Publish with Descendants" maintains existing publish behaviour but raises both Publishing and Published notifications, both including X and descendants A, B, C, and D in the PublishedEntities collection;
• Default - No change

With no value set, the default would be the existing behaviour. The decision can then be made by the developer.

"Content": {
  "PublishBehaviour": "Default | AlwaysRepublish | AlwaysNotify",
},

Also ...

I would suggest that:

• When Default is selected, if a node has no changes either the "Publish" button is greyed out or clicking it doesn't republish or raise notifications. This would provide the consistency between the options.

• New ContentRepublishingNotification and ContentRepublishedNotification classes are made available for when Default or AlwaysRepublish modes are selected.

[kieron-mcintyre]

@AndyButland @Zeegaan @shearer3000 @Rockerby @bkclerke Hi guys, any thoughts on this?

[Rockerby]

Cheers for the detailed discussion @kieron-mcintyre !

Not sure I agree that a setting on what to do here is the way forward, but I totally agree with the need for consistency.

If I came into this fresh, knowing nothing about it, I would expect the same behaviour from clicking "publish" on a node as I would do triggering the publish from one of it's ancestors. I.e. audit trail, republish, events, index rebuild. Even down to the republishing of content (maybe a "this can be a super heavy operation" warning wouldn't go a-miss!)

[kieron-mcintyre]

@Rockerby Thanks for the feedback mate.

The challenge here I believe is that we aren't going to get consistency in behaviour from Umbraco as a default. There are too many projects in existence that are built upon the current way of delivering notifications. To introduce consistency would be to knowingly break everyone's sites, and that would upset a lot of people.

My idea of a config setting is to mitigate against this. Using the setting, developers (rather than editors) can opt in to the behaviour they want, with the default being the current behaviour.

I think it's also important to draw the distinction that this is a developer feature, not an editor feature.