Oracle’s Support Tools for Oracle WebCenter Sites offers a utility called ‘Fake Publishing’. This utility is highly efficient, yet underrated and not well documented by Oracle. We’re going to show you how you can start utilizing this incredibly helpful tool today.
Issue
Let’s say your content editors are authoring content on Production Editorial instance and then publishing it to Production Delivery instance. Unfortunately, your Authoring is corrupted for an unknown reason, causing an immediate need to rebuild your OWCS Authoring instance with all the contents up-to-date. What do you do now?
Next Step
This issue calls for a need to propagate all the contents of Delivery system (assuming it is the single source of truth at the moment) to a new Authoring system.
There are a couple of possible ways to achieve this:
- You can clone the already working Delivery instance to a new Authoring instance and perform all the post-cloning activities to bring up a new instance that works as Production Authoring.
- You can set up an entirely fresh OWCS Authoring instance, create a new Publishing destination from Production Delivery to the new Production Authoring, and then do ‘Reverse Publishing’ (Beware! This carries with it some caveats which we are not going to go into here. For today’s issue, permanently suspend the newly created queue after publishing).
Other Challenges
In both solutions listed above, the challenge is that both the Authoring and Delivery systems are now a new couple and don’t know about each other’s past! For example:
- For an asset existing in both instances, the asset was never actually published from Authoring (new) to Delivery. So if the asset is deleted in Authoring, you will not be able to publish this deletion to Delivery because WCS thinks it was never published to Delivery and that it does not exist in Delivery. As a result, you may have many unwanted assets that need to be deleted directly in Delivery, which is not recommended.
- To avoid the above case, if an asset is tried to approve and publish explicitly, it would bring in a lot of dependencies to Delivery, because it thinks it is going to Delivery for the very first time and it needs to carry all of its dependencies to avoid any broken links in Delivery.
Solution: Fake Publish Utility
This utility is a solution for the above challenges. It marks all the approved assets as published to a destination. If the approved assets are already available on the target system, this tool notifies the approval system of that state.
It marks all assets ready to publish as ‘Published’. This is useful if you have copied the source database to the target as an initial content launch process and you want to let the source system know that the asset(s) are already ‘Published’ to the target.
- Note 1: This Utility does not allow you to selectively choose the assets to be marked as published.
- Note 2: This Utility should only be used when the approved assets are already available on the target system.
How to locate the Utility:
URL: http(s)://<host>:<port>/<sites-context>/ContentServer?pagename= Support/TCPI/AP/NotePublish
Path: Support Home -> Approval -> Mark as Published
Pre-requisite: Support Tools is installed on the instance where the issue has occurred, and the user is logged in.
- Choose the publishing destination to which the Fake Publishing must happen.
Note: If you select a destination, the process will start immediately.
- Once the destination is selected and the process is triggered, the utility marks all the approved assets as ‘published’ in the batch size of 20 assets. The resultant table displays the sl.no, Asset type and Asset Id: Modified date
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