Publish Transactions filtering strange behavior

Question

We had a very strange behavior on our environment so I'm wondering if anyone can explain how this came to be. There were some "stale" Publish Transactions in the queue in Waiting for Deployment phase, they were in this state for a couple of days at least. How they ended up as such is irrelevant (there were restarts of the Deployer, Publisher services etc.). What doesn't make sense is the following:

1. All of those transactions would show up when we queried the Publish Transactions table directly from the DB

2. (We have checked the Queue Messages table, those transactions weren't referenced)

3. When using Core Service with the appropriate filter (for that exact state + no other conditions), none of those transactions would show up
4. When reading one of the transactions using Core Service (with the transaction ID obtained from the DB), we would get the transaction, it indeed existed. When observing the properties, the state was indeed the same for which the previous querying showed no results
5. When querying the Publishing Queue for that exact state, none of those transactions would show up. All other filters were switched off (date, publications, etc.)
6. When querying the Publishing Queue for that exact state + the appropriate user + a the appropriate publication, the relevant transactions would show up

What could cause the transactions to not show up in the results when filtering only using the state, having in mind that more specific filtering did result in the relevant transactions? The Core Service and Publishing queue were both "used" by an admin account.

Unfortunately I am unable to show screenshots of the query results as we have already resent those transactions for publishing.

The system is Tridion 2013 SP1.

Answer 1

Interesting. :-)

I can’t relly explain what you observed, but I do know that particularly the Waiting for Deployment state is a very tricky one, because it is used for two different things:

1. Originally, it was used for Publish Transactions with scheduled deployment. Such Publish Transactions are rendered and transported, but not deployed yet; a scheduled message is put in the deploy queue and the Publish Transaction goes into Scheduled for Deployment/Waiting for Deployment state (depending on time).
2. Later (2009 release or so) the deployer could report additional, interim states and these are mapped to Publish Transaction states in CM. Unfortunately, one of these interim states is Waiting for Deployment.

There is quite some magic code around this state to distinguish the different scenarios. It seems like the magic is working against you in your scenario.

Long story short: this indeed sounds like a defect. :-)