Click to deploy, Update Content Workflow Task - This week in Orchard (17/04/2020)
This week we come with a demo about an upcoming new feature of Orchard Core called Click to deploy. We also mention the improvements of the workflows and the documentation. Don't forget we published three new Orchard Nuggets post this week! And it's time to release Orchard Core RC 2!
Orchard Core updates
Tab placement documentation
You have the option to place a part in a different tab in the editor of the given content type. To do that, you have to add a custom placement.json file to your module. In that file, you can tell the name of the part that will be moved to another tab and the name of the tab which will be created on the fly.
Fixes Workflow Timer
There was some issue with the Timer event that would reenter themselves. There is a new parameter called isExclusive: when we invoke a workflow task we can say this task should not be re-entered. If it's true, a new workflow instance is not created if an existing one is already halted on a starting activity related to this event. If you would like to run it and it's already running, don't start it again. It's also fixing some background tasks executed in every minute and runs longer than one minute.
Here you can see the TriggerEventAsync method in the WorkflowManager class with the optional isExclusive boolean parameter.
And here you could see the TimerBackgroundTask that is responsible to trigger workflow timer events. Here you could see the TriggerEventAsync method call with using the isExclusive parameter.
Upgrade documentation to Material 5
Orchard Core documentation is using MkDocs, which is a static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation. You can find several open-source themes for MkDocs, Orchard Core documentation is using the theme called Material Design theme. Material 5 has been released and now Orchard Core documentation is also using the new version. Here you can see the highlights of this new version.
You can also find a Samples page with great examples about how to use the different kinds of formattings which come from the extensions provided by the new theme. If you click on the pen icon at the right-top corner of the page you can see the Markdown syntax of this page.
Adding Update Content Workflow Task
When we create a new workflow, we had three different tasks related to content operations:
- Create Content
- Delete Content
- Retrieve Content
- Unpublish Content
- Publish Content
From now we have a new task called Update Content. If you create a new workflow and hit the Add Task button, you will find this task in the Content category. Here you can set the content type and the content item ID to update and of course the JSON representation of the content item which will be used to update the content item.
Demos
Click to Deploy
Click to Deploy is about adding a deploy action to the content item list. First of all head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Click to Deploy Content feature. Now go to the content items list by clicking Content -> Content Items. You have a dropdown called Actions for every content item. By clicking on this button you will see a new option, called Deploy. When you click that you will see the Available Targets window where you can choose any of the targets that you have preconfigured. If you choose the File Download option you will get a recipe that contains the particular content item in it. But you can use bulk actions too to deploy multiple content items as well.
It's configured by creating a particular deployment plan and it's possible to add just the Click to Deploy Content deployment step to the plan or you can also choose to add a content definition step for example. So, in case of every time if you ship a new file to a remote server you will transfer the content definitions too.
There is a little setting that you have to set under Configuration -> Import/Export -> Click to Deploy Content. Here you have to pick the particular plan that contains a Click to Deploy Content deployment plan. And the selected plan will be used when you are hitting the Deploy button in the content items list page.
If you are interested in the full demo don't forget to watch the recording on YouTube!
Note that this feature is under development and can be found in this branch!
News from the community
It's time to release Orchard Core RC 2!
Orchard Core RC 1 was released on Sep 24, 2019, which was more than a half year from now. In the meantime Orchard Core has several new features and bug fixes, which makes it a more stable CMS, that is now used in several sites in production as well. Just remember the sites in Show Orchard with the Orchard Core category. Another issue is that the RC 1 release is using the .NET Core 3.0 version of the .NET Core framework, which is now at the end of support, that means that release has reached the end of life, meaning it is no longer supported and it is recommended to move to a supported release.
If you navigate to the issues page in GitHub, filter for the rc2 milestone. Here you can see only the things that are required for RC 2. The real issue here is to update module manifest URL and version and to prevent custom scripts by default. After that, the community will ship the new release of Orchard Core!
New Orchard Nuggets posts
Let's imagine you've already created an Orchard Core app and now it's time to show it to the world. How do you publish it, or rather, how do you create its publish package? Build processes of .NET Core apps like Orchard Core are getting quite complex nowadays, and the MSBuild build pipeline also commonly includes steps for building client-side resources or doing a lot of things out of the .NET world. What can you do if something goes off course with all those targets and props files and you're just scratching your head? How to figure out what happens during the build if you can only see that the results are incorrect?
In our newest Orchard Nuggets posts, we give you the answers! Read this Nugget for an answer about how to publish an Orchard Core app, the second one about how to debug an MSBuild build process when building Orchard Core and the third one for 4 ways to display something from your module nested within a page in Orchard Core! Don't forget to check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question!
Orchard Core workshops
The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in the coming months, between May and September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events.
Lombiq's developers will also give two workshops, on using Orchard from the admin UI and on developing a module.
Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage!
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veronica zibin said
Hi, regarding update content task. Is it possible to update menu with new link menu item, created in previous "create item task". I do understand that I have to retrieve link menu item through correlationId() and use Workflow.LastResult. But I din't find a way to add new item to main menu.
Any way thanks for all updates and example, I learning a lot from blog.
Gábor Domonkos said
Yes, I think you can do that. If you check the CreatePost method of the AdminController in the OrchardCore.Menu module, you will see that it's about updating the JSON definition of a Menu content item adding the menu item to the menuItems JArray. What did you try?