Something that would be very useful to us would be a menu option in Workbench to display a printable summary of a content type definition. Then, when someone complains that they cannot make a certain edit to a certain content type, but users being users they cannot precisely describe the field and values that cause the problem, we could print off a summary and go to their office. It would need to include all shared, system and child fieldsets, and all the details of visibility, editablity, validation rules and transformations. We could then watch them, scan through the print-out, and be able to say “Ah yes, it is because we have added X validation rule to Y field, based on Z prerequisites.”
IIRC, all this information is in XML files. So an XSLT stylesheet could be written to dump field details to a HTML page. I’d do it, if I could make sense of the XML structure, and could be sure it wouldn’t be wasted effort if 6.6 changes the syntax.
I think this is a good idea, not so much to deal with end-users, but to compare the content types on a development to the ones on production. We manually migrate code from development to production and would really like the ability to diff content types, templates, et cetera.
You can already export content types to XML files via the Workbench. Do that on both servers, then diff the two files. Diff’ing XML files doesn’t always work, as line-by-line order isn’t always maintained by XML parsers, but it usually finds the differences in configuration of individual fields. There are lots of unintelligible nodes, containing numbers that may or may not be IDs, which you might or might not be able to cross-reference, if you have a lot of time on your hands. But it is worth doing if you, or bugs in Workbench, cause your content types to become corrupted. Of course, if you make heavy use of shared fields, those will need to be compared too, along with system field.
[QUOTE=Andrew Morrison;9163]You can already export content types to XML files via the Workbench. Do that on both servers, then diff the two files.
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If you’ve got a windows environment then Beyond Compare is superb for this kind of thing. You can give it all sorts of rules about things to ignore (using regular expressions) and it makes things much easier.
Having said that, a few years back one of the UK consultants (who’s now in the US) created a ‘documentor’ utility which would describe content types, workflows, validation which sounds very close to what you’re after - part of its benefit was for tech support to get an instant breakdown of a customers configuration without fighting through the workbench. It certainly worked in 5.7 and I believe it was updated for 6.x, but I don’t know much else I’m afraid.
It was always an ‘internal only’ utility and not supported. Maybe someone from Percussion can look into this and let us know if this is something that could be easily made available to customers - with a ‘we won’t support it if it doesn’t work’ caveat…
Thanks for the info David. Anyone care to reply to the idea of releasing this ‘documentor’ utility? In addition to the reasons give already, it would make life much easier when MSM cannot transfer your changes, a situation I find myself in now.
