DXA Website using DXA 2 CTP2 Microservice doesn't load

Question

We're currently setting up a demo site using DXA 2 CTP2. We set up all Web 8.5 microservices and the DXA model Microservice, and we published all pages. However, the example DXA website doesn't load, and in the model microservice, we see an error

2017-12-12 10:53:27,578 WARN  c.s.d.m.s.ModelService - Cannot expand entity EntityModelData(id=294-169, linkUrl=null, content=null, binaryContent=null, externalContent=null) for page PageRequestDto(publicationId=5, uriType=tcm, path=/error-404, includePages=INCLUDE, contentType=MODEL, expansionDepth=100, depthCounter=com.sdl.dxa.common.dto.DepthCounter@97) 
com.sdl.webapp.common.exceptions.DxaItemNotFoundException: Cannot find a CP for componentUritcm:5-294, templateUritcm:5-169-32

This made us have a look in the Broker DB. We noticed that some Component Presentations were published dynamically, using a specific dynamic template "Generate Data Presentation", but others were not.

We managed to fix this by manually publishing all Components used in the DXA example site, and after this, our site started to work.

My question now is: how come certain items are published automatically using the correct template, and others had to be published manually? Is there some specific thing to configure to make this happen automatically?

Answer 1

If everything is correct the documentation should mention that you need to publish the entire Publication for the example website to function correctly.

The general idea was that we would have a custom resolver that would take care of publishing the linked Components (DCPs to be correct). But the custom resolver which was added in the CTP 2 release didn't do its job correctly yet, we will have an updated version in the actual release.