I can’t think of any project where at some point in the build I’ve needed to check the item’s XML, usually to get a path, check check security or some other content related detail.

My solutions to this have varied depending on the situation:

A custom template – A small bit of code as a Tridion page template, where the TCM is added directly into the code, which is going into the Tridion database and returns XML.  Essentially update the code with the new TCMID and preview the page.  This is fine but it’s a bit slow in terms of updating and previewing.

Webdav - Great, but  this only works when you want to view components, schema and templates.

Using the windows run menu – Entering the item TCM ID in the windows run menu will bring back the given items XML, this is great, but only works if you’re on the actual CM machine.

Thanks Yoav’s, this is a fantastic solution, plus all of the above are now redundant!

What would be cool if these could be part of the installed GUI with configurable security to only show this to members of a certain group and to hide from others that simply don’t need it.

Whilst Tridion 2009 had a visually enhanced content manager interface (GUI), this was merely a new lick of CSS to give the GUI a visual refresh over Tridion 5.X versions.

However the SDL Tridon 2011 GUI has been completely re-built from scratch (using Microsoft .NET, older versions we’re ASP based) and has a new design layout featuring a Microsoft Office style ‘ribbon’ containing older contextual menu functions.

Even better not only does Tridion 2011 now run on all browsers and platforms (previously it was Windows IE only!) it also seems to function on IPads and IPhones.

I’m looking forward to having a play with 2011 and seeing what other new enhancements are present.

If you’re interested in seeing the new GUI in action have a watch of this Youtube video that has been uploaded.

Thanks to Rainmaker2k and of course Julian for putting this information out there.

Note: All of the below are tests performed in Tridion 2009.

Item naming.
The following rules are present:

The CMS GUI will not let you enter more than 250 characters when naming (the item Title field) Publications, Folders, Components and Structure groups.  This also applied to the Structure Group “directory” field.

I found the page ‘Title’ field has a little quirk when naming as the GUI will allow an infinite number of characters however, if you enter more than 255, you will receive an error message like the one below:

The page ‘Filename’ follows the normal convention of only allowing a user to enter 250 characters.

Tridion will allow most special characters, with the exception of “/” but I wouldn’t recommend ever using special characters as this will only lead to problems later in life J

If you simply must have special chars in your naming this post may help you should you ever need to obtain such items using WebDav.

WebDAV paths.
The maximum length of a WedDAV path (on the system tested) is 300 characters.  Which means it is very easy to exceed this limit with a combination of long folder names and a deep folder structure.

The best advice is to keep all naming as short as possible and again avoid special characters.

Final note, I’ve only experimented with the items mentioned above, but I’m sure the same rules apply to items such as Page & Component templates etc.

To run the script here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new page, component or template building block
2. Paste in the code below
3. Change the value of the variable strCategoryID to the TCM ID of your category
4. Preview code to execute it

[%

Dim strCategoryID : strCategoryID = "tcm:21-88-512"

' Call the function passing in the categoryID
DeleteKeywordsFromCategory(strCategoryID)

Function DeleteKeywordsFromCategory(categoryID)

' Get the Category object - TCM must be valid!
Dim objCategory : Set objCategory = GetTomObject(categoryID)

For each objKeyword in objCategory.GetItems(1024) ' 1024 is the item type for keyword
Writeout "Deleting keyword: " + objKeyword.Title & "<br />"
objKeyword.Delete
Next

End Function
%]

Once ran, you should see something like this:

Obviously such a basic example could be performed using the GUI, but this could certainly be customised to delete a certain keyword from a category, rename a keyword, display a list of keywords etc.

When opening or obtaining an item via its webdav path you’ll need to be encoded to ensure the reference is correct.  Most common is the  space character as %20 but trying to remember all of them is an absolute nightmare.

Here is an example. The image below shows the Tridion CMS component that contains the special characters %, &,  ë and space :

To access this component the following webdav path should be used:

/webdav/<YOURPUBNAME>/Building%20Blocks/New%20%25%20%26%20Component%20%C3%AB.xml

Where  <YOURPUBNAME> is the name of the Tridion publication.

Anyway already with just these special characters the path is starting to look a little hairy so it’s probably for the best that you don’t use them, but in the event that you need to “translate” one then the following table will be incredibly useful.

Tridion CMS webdav special character table.

Perhaps someone out there has time to make a building block that performs this operation and tidies up webdav URL’s

Update: Here is a c# function to do the replacing for you that you can use in .NET project

        public static string ConvertWebDavSpecialChars(string inputString)
        {
            string returnString = inputString;
            returnString = returnString.Replace("%", "%25");
            returnString = returnString.Replace(" ", "%20");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("í", "%C3%AD");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ì", "%C3%8C");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ç", "%C3%87");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ó", "%C3%B3");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("¯", "%C2%AF");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ü", "%C3%BC");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ú", "%C3%BA");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ó", "%C3%93");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("é", "%C3%A9");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ñ", "%C3%B1");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ß", "%C3%9F");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("â", "%C3%A2");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ñ", "%C3%91");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ô", "%C3%94");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ä", "%C3%A4");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ª", "%C2%AA");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ò", "%C3%92");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("à", "%C3%A0");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("º", "%C2%BA");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Õ", "%C3%B5");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("å", "%C3%A5");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("¿", "%C2%BF");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Õ", "%C3%95");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ç", "%C3%A7");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("µ", "%C2%B5");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ê", "%C3%AA");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("½", "%C2%BD");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Þ", "%C3%BE");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ë", "%C3%AB");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("¼", "%C2%BC");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Þ", "%C3%9E");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("è", "%C3%A8");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("¡", "%C2%A1");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ú", "%C3%9A");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("ï", "%C3%AF");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("«", "%C2%AB");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Û", "%C3%9B");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("î", "%C3%AE");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("»", "%C2%BB");
            returnString = returnString.Replace("Ù", "%C3%99");
            return returnString;
        }

A defect has been reported and validated in the SDL Tridion 2009 Content Delivery API – GetTaxonomyComponentPresentations’

The method ‘GetTaxonomyComponentPresentations’ is returning DCPs from multiple publications – the method is intended to return DCPs only from the same Publication the Taxonomy exists in. As a workaround, you may use a direct Broker Query to retrieve the components tagged with the keyword, then retrieve DCPs based on those components with ComponentPresentationFactory. A JSP sample is provided below.

Query   brokerQuery = new Query();

Criteria   Criteria1 = new Criteria(

new TaxonomyKeywordCriteria(taxonomyURI, firstkeywordURI),

new TaxonomyKeywordCriteria(taxonomyURI, secondKeywordURI),

new ItemTypeCriteria(16),

new PublicationCriteria(44)

);

brokerQuery.setCriteria(Criteria1);

String[]   foundItems = brokerQuery.executeQuery();

/*   Retrieve componentpresentations */

ComponentPresentationFactory   ……

It’s a shame they have just released Service Pack 1 for WCMS 2009 as this would have been a nice issue to have resolved.  I wonder if this will be resolved in Service Pack 2, or added to WCMS 2010.

As always interested to know if anyone has other workarounds than the one above.

Releases and Hotfixes:

SDL Tridion 2009 Service Pack 1

SDL Web Content Management Solutions has released Service Pack 1 of it’s flagship SDL Tridion 2009.

Hotfixes

Following hotfixes have recently been made available.

SDL Tridion 2009 GA

• CD_2009.0.66615
  Generated Broker Queries are too slow when using multiple OR operations.

SiteEdit 2009 GA

• SE_2_1_0_67110
  Each web site needs to be on a separate port, you cannot use only host names/host headers.

SiteEdit 1.3 Service Pack 1

• SE_1.3.2.66293
  When publishing a page with SiteEdit in the page template (the page has no component) within Workflow from the work list. The page is published to the staging site successfully. When accessing the page using SiteEdit. The SiteEdit menu at the lower left corner only shows “User Work Items”, the other SiteEdit menu items seen in the Preview in Tridion GUI don’t show. The SiteEdit works fine in the Preview box in Tridion GUI.

SDL Tridion 5.3 Service Pack 1

• CM_5.3.1.66168
  Unwanted tags are inserted when switching between the Source and Design tabs.
• CM_5.3.1.66777
  When updating a “Publication Path” and “Publication URL”, the Directory location of the Structure Group contains 2 slashes instead of one.
• CM_5.3.1.67669
  When publishing content, a large amount of database roundtrips can be measured on both an Oracle Database and SQL Server installations. The amount of database executes may likely cause a performance degradation.

SDL Tridion 5.3 GA

• CM_5.3.0.67972
  When publishing an item, any un-publish settings specified by the user are stored. These stored settings are then re-applied the next time the Publish dialog is opened.

WebForms 2010 GA

• WF_2010.0.67795
  Error “object required” occurs when trying to create a new Component in a folder which has a Linked Content Schema.
• WF_2010.0.67259
  When .ASPX .NET WebForm is used and everything has been set to UTF-8 certain submitted characters (for example ö ä ä ) are not rendered correctly.

Outbound Email 2009 GA

• OE_2.0.0.67244
  The logging on the Presentation server does not display sufficient information to debug synchronization issues, therefore making it extremely difficult or even impossible to troubleshoot.
• OE_2.0.0.65077
  Closed statement exception thrown when synchronizing to a presentation side that uses an Oracle database to store the contact profiles.
• OE_2.0.0.64011
  Bounce Processor service does not update Contact error status or Mailing statistics.
• OE_2.0.0.63942
  Tracked Page link isn’t resolved when creating it using the Outbound E-mail Tracking system.

The release looks pretty standard and the fixes look pretty small.  That said the client I’m currently working for will not be releasing it any time in the near future so if anyone has installed it, i’d be interested to know how it went.

• No pages in the publication are published
• There are dependencies on the publication, child publications etc.

Normally it’s a simple case of un-publishing everything you need, removing these dependencies then away you go.

However in one particular instance when d

I wouldn’t be suprised if you’ve ever been in the situation where you wish to delete a publication but when trying to doing so Tridion throws up an error that the ‘publication contains published items’…

Luckily you can read more about the error by clicking the “details” button

Damn it, that isn’t useful.  What would be nice is if Tridion said “OK you’re an admin, shall I just get rid of it?” but unfortunately that isn’t the case.

So you’re in a situation, you want to remove the publication, but you’ve got published items and Tridion doesn’t have the functionality to tell you what is published.

To get round this problem I have written myself a little script that I run as a page template to give me a list of TCM id’s that are published.   It’s a simple piece of code but it’s incredibly helpful.  Here is how to use it:

1. Create a new page template in your publication (or parent publication if one exists) called ‘Published pages list’ and enter the file extension txt.
2. Copy the code below into this template.
3. Save and close it.
4. Once saved preview the code by chosing ‘Preview’ and selecting any page from the pop-up window.

The result should look a little like this depending on the number of published items you have:

What is great about the code is that it is simple enough to modify should you for example wish to see other information about the item for example if it is localised, checked out, get it’s  path, xml and so on.

The code

[%
Function WhatIsPublished()

  dim lDomDoc, publicationURI, listColumnFilter, objListRowFilter, objTDSE
  dim pagenodes, objchild, mode, counter

  ' set basic variables
  counter = 0
  publicationURI = page.Publication.ID
  set objTDSE = CreateObject("TDS.TDSE")

  ' -- Column filtering
    listColumnFilter = 15 	' 15 contains IsPublished, IsShared, IsLocalized

  ' --- Row filtering
    set objListRowFilter = objTDSE.CreateListRowFilter()
    call objListRowFilter.SetCondition("ItemType", 68)	' 68 - page + sg
    call objListRowFilter.SetCondition("Recursive", true)
    call objListRowFilter.SetCondition("Recursive", true)

  XMLStr = Page.Publication.GetListItems(listColumnFilter , objListRowFilter)
  Set lDomDoc = GetNewDOMDocument()
  Call lDomDoc.loadXML(XMLStr)
  Set XMLRoot = lDomDoc.selectNodes("//tcm:ListItems")

  For Each Node In XMLRoot
    set pagenodes = Node.childnodes
      for each objchild in pagenodes
        if  objchild.getattribute("IsPublished") ="true" then
          Writeout objchild.getattribute("ID") & ""
        end if
      next
  Next

  set objTDSE = nothing
  set XMLRoot = nothing
  set objListRowFilter = nothing

End Function
%]

So now you’ve got a list of published item TCM id’s.  From here you can investigate the problem as to why they are published, reasons for which I will be covering in future posts.

So to recap.  Tridion will now allow the removal of a publication if it has published items, but the CMS doesn’t have a function to display a list of these items.  The script provided above allows you to create a simple list of items that are published, and from there you can investigate why and where these items are published.