All components of same type are begin (re)published when publishing single component

Question

I have the following component template:

So a News component can be published, it doesn't need to be on a page, exactly the behavior I want.

I also like to have the the possibility to add a component link to a news component on a landing page, to show it as a highlighted item. So I have a component in which I can add component links to news components, I add that component on a page (the component template has the configuration to publish it embedded on a page).

The interesting (and annoying) part is that when I publish a news component which is also added as highlighted item a landing page, ALL news components are published.

When I publish a news component which is not added as highlighted item, then only that component is published.

I see this as a bug, or am I missing something?

Answer 1

It looks like you have stumbled upon a use case of link propagation with SDL Tridion. There are multiple blogs (highlighted below) explaining link propagation in detail.

• Old, still relevant
• Code sample (stackexchange)

You can also write a simple event system code to handle link propagation differently but resolver works better since it works during "Show Items to Publish" functionality as well.

Hope it helps!

Answer 2

This is expected (albeit annoying) behavior.

The two scenarios result in different publishing results (and - important to note - unpublishing!).

The challenge you have is that you want to utilize both methods - something you will therefore have to account for.

1. Publishing a DCP will publish all variations of that Component in it's different presentation options (that is - against all the different templates that the schema on which the component is based is supported)
2. Publishing a Component that is linked to a page as a static Component Presentation will result in publishing that Page (and consequently all the other Component Presentations on that Page too).
3. If you mix the two (as you note, to add a manually controlled highlighted item, or if you want to manually control the ordering of {DCP} items on a specific page) then Publishing the DCP will result in publishing all instances of that DCP and republishing the Page as described in point 2 above.

Similarly, if you unpublish that DCP it will unpublish the page - something we often catch by way of an extension to remove the page from the (un)publish package!

You may want to remove the page from publishing also but this only makes sense if the DCP is rendered dynamically on the page and not rendered during publishing (or the updated content may not be reflected on that specific, published page)