How to track the changes made on Page?

Question

I have a requirement where I need to track the changes made on page every time it is published on PROD.

I am planning to use PublishInfo of the page and get the timestamp of second last published event.

ArrayOfPublishInfoData info = client.getListPublishInfo(Page.Id);

        for (PublishInfoData infoData : info.getPublishInfoData()) {

            System.out.println(infoData.getPublishedAt());
        }

But above code is returning null against the published date.

After that iterate over the componentpresentation and compare if any particular component is updated after the above timestamp and list it as changes made on the page.

I am using the below event to initiate the business logic:

EventSystem.Subscribe<PublishTransaction, SetPublishStateEventArgs>(InformUsers, EventPhases.TransactionCommitted);

Please let me know if it is a good way or is there any other way to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Tridion does not store publish information other than the latest publish. You will have to write custom code to capture this information. We had the need to show publish info like who published, when, what version and to which target to users and that's when we found out it is not available out of the box. We wrote event system code using async methods to capture this information.

For your case, you need to do something similar OR alternatively you can capture the package on publish and save the pages xml which will have full rendered xml of the page, which you can use for comparison.

Answer 2

The SetPublishState event is only called after a successful transaction, reference

If you use this event on transactioncommitted, then current publish would have already succeeded and the time from publishinfo will be current date time and you will not find any components modified after that.

There are two approaches that you can try:

1. Instead of using TransactionCommitted phase, use Initiated phase
2. Instantiate workflow which will perform the tracking of the changes and ultimately publish the page.

I would recommend approach 2 as it is more clean approach and you will not block the publishing queue while other transactions are performing the tracking activity.

Please note, event system with Async also blocks publishing queue so other items will have to wait.