In Web 8 Components stopped resolving after changing Publication path

Question

I have changed the Publication path of one of my Publications in Web 8. It is resolving and publishing Pages correctly but when I tried to publish a Component, it is not resolving. By resolving I mean it was resolving to itself and showing in Show items to publish when I select the publishing target. Components were resolving and publishing fine before changing the path.

In the Publishing queue it is showing a warning that no items are resolved. Also worth to mention here that I am not using this component on any page. I am wondering if I need to do any changes in configuration anywhere after changing the Publication path. I know it doesn't matter but for sharing information about environment it is a Web 8 and DXA 1.4.

Answer 1

Your question seems to indicate that resolving of the Component you are publishing now did work before the path change, but you fail to explicitly mention that.

After changing the Publication Path of your Publication, you should basically republish all content, since it now should be moved to a different path. Please make sure you have done that.

When publishing a Component, you are bascially telling the CMS to Publish all Pages where the selcted Component is on, provided that Page had been published before (publishing Components is always a republish action for the Pages it is on). Next to that the CMS looks for possible Dynamic Component Templates associated with the Schema the selected Component is based on, and it will publish those Component Presentations.

If you check the documentation about publishing (http://docs.sdl.com/LiveContent/content/en-US/SDL%20Web-v1/GUID-C9EF0813-2B50-4227-BA88-17AA893161E3), you will see that in step 5, there is an option to see what the resolve action of the selected item will consist of. It is always useful to check that, and if it shows nothing (which it would since that is what the warning in your Publish Transaction mentions), you can then investigate why this is.

Now the resolve action itself should have no relation to your Publication path change, which is why I started with the remark that you failed to mention iof this did work before you changed the path. Things you can do to check if something should be resolved is check the Where Used information of the Component and see if it is included on a Page. If not, that is a good indication of why the resolve action will be empty.

Maybe you can edit your question and update it with some additional information. Like was this working before the Publicatioon path change, and on which Pages is the Component you are trying to publish included, and what is your expected/wanted outcome of the resolve action exactly?

Update

You mention you are using DXA, in that case the Publication path is completely irrelevant, since you are publishing everything to the Broker database, only the Publication URL and the Images URL are relevant. And that is, only when you are using the legacy Publication Targets, when using the Web 8 Topology Manager, these settings are done in the Topology mappings. See also http://docs.sdl.com/LiveContent/content/en-US/SDL%20DXA-v5/GUID-7D334E4E-72F7-4AAA-B541-7A845E15C88C

If you are using a legacy Publication Target, and you have changed the Publication URL (rather than the Publication Path you mention), then you should republish all Pages, since their URL will be different (this also means you should be using the in-process CD API, in which case you need to change the path mapping also in the cd_dynamic_conf.xml). If you are using the Topology Manager these changes should be made in there. So I do have a question as to why you think you needed to change the Publication Path (and if you in fact changed the Publication Path and not the Publication URL)?

Regardless of the above, to my knowledge that should not have any effect on the resolving of Components. You mention the Component resolved to itself before the change, which means you are talking about a Dynamic Component Presentation. This means there was a Dynamic Component Template before, associated with the same Schema the Component was based on. If it doesn't resolve anymore, it sounds like something has changed in that Component Template.

Update 2

I just confirmed on a Web 8 machine, resolving a DCP (by selecting a Component for Publish and checking the show items to publish) is not affected by changing the Publication Path. I've changed it back and forth, and it always works. So the only conclusion I ca draw from that is that there is something strange happening on your machine.

It could possibly be a custom resolver that is installed that has influence to this, or there really is something wrong at your server. SO if you can rule out any customizations that are causing this, I suggest you contact Customer Support.

ps. please also note my first update again, you mention "relative path earlier configured was not valid as per plan", but in Web 8 and DXA, the Publication Path is not used (that is only relevant for file system publishing, and DXA publishes to the Broker only). The Publication URL is something which is relevant, but for Web 8 we keep that empty and define the mapping in Topology Manager.

Answer 2

This is a bit long for a comment but after walking through this I'll either delete or change to be an answer.

Can you clarify what you mean by when I tried to publish a Component, it is not resolving.

I'm assuming by tried to publish a Component you mean you tried to publish a dynamic component presentation (as opposed to a component to trigger a number of pages in which it's a static component being published)?

If my assumption is correct - then it's important that you define exactly what you mean by not resolving:

• do you mean it isn't publishing the dynamic component presentation (this includes showing it in the items to be published in the publish dialog)?
  • if this is the case I would suggest you test with a static component on a Page also, in which case:
    • Does the page still publish (I think it will be, based on your comments but let's confirm)?
    • Did selecting to publish the static component show the page to be published / publish the page?
      • if it didn't; does the page show in show where used for the static Component - irrespective of the answer to this one - it would look like something to report to SDL Support at this point to me.
      • if it did; it's something specific to the Dynamic Component Presentation (that's not to say it's not something for support but let's get this far first)