Layouts & Cards: Update Failure or Won’t Delete

[kristen_conde]

Select Layouts and Cards are failing to update properly. This is true for unpublished Layouts with no associated Collections, and for unpublished Cards with no associated Layouts. In addition, in some instances for published Layouts or Cards show a Status of “Update Failed, Out of Date," but changes are making their way to the app. This is occurring to some Layouts and Cards, but not all; in addition, some Layouts and Cards work fine for a time and then fail to publish or won’t delete. Is this a known issue? [using publish.adobe.com, app version 2015.2.100]

[kristen_conde]

As a follow-up, this afternoon I was able to unpublish and remove the cards and layouts. It's unclear why the behavior changed today in the last hour, nor is this behavior consistent today.

I have the same problem with some collections. Several collections have a status of "Update Failed," or "Update Failed, Out of Date." I am unable to unpublish to delete, or publish again to alter the status. In some cases, changing the Associated Layout then publishing again corrected the problem; but not in all cases.

Also, in some cases where an issue is successfully published, unpublishing the issue results in at status of "Update Failed." Multiple attempts to unpublish fail. Changing the Associated Layout then publishing again corrects the status [to Published]; but not in all cases.

[kristen_conde]

Following up again, I continue to have a collection with a status of Update Failed, I am not able to unpublish the collection in order to delete and re-migrate from Classic. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

[Colin_Fleming · Accepted solution]

Hey Kristen -- Sounds complicated, and I'm not sure I get all the details completely, but I've had similar experiences and started to notice the following, mostly with cards and layouts.

Scenario:

     I have a card and use it in a mapping rule for a layout. Everything's cool, working as desired.

     Now I want to delete the card (I'm resetting things for a demo session and want to start with no cards or layouts except for the defaults.)

     If I delete the card first, I'll get the "Update Failed, Out of Date" message.

     To avoid this or clear it, I need to delete all mapping rules in all layouts that call the card and publish all these layouts (without the card reference.)

     Then I can unpublished and delete the card.

     I follow a similar procedure for deleting layouts --

     Set all collections so that none use the layout you want to delete

     Publish all collections that are out of date.

     Then you can unpublished and delete the unwanted layout.

Perhaps that's rather fussy, but it works.

I had similar experiences with articles and collections. If an article or collection is used in more than one collection, I would get a similar error. I had to work out which article or collection was used in multiple locations before I could unpublished and delete.

Hope that helps

[kristen_conde]

Thank you Colin, this is what I found as well as a solution. Is this considered a bug that will be fixed for release? It's hard to imagine this as a solution for customer-facing published editions if an update fails to publish and this loop results.

[Neil_Enns_-_Ado]

Hi Kristen,

I sent this thread to the cards & layouts team so they can make sure we understand what's going on here before our public release.

Neil

[Colin_Fleming]

Bug? Beta? Complicated combination of divergent expectations? Who's to say. ;-)

Some have expected/requested that when you delete a collection all articles that were in it also should be deleted.

One might draw a parallel to cards and layouts. If you delete the layout, should all cards used in card mapping also be deleted?

hmmm.

I suspect that there are some rather intricate aspects to these deletion processes. And I'm comfortable that we're in beta, and early in a new product.

Share your thoughts on this, our Product Managers are watching and adjusting development.

But at a basic level, I'd agree that this needs to be addressed. Perhaps with a more meaningful error message?

We do appreciate your thoughts and ideas.

[andreig1004688]

Hey Kirsten,

Thanks for pointing this out. We are working on preventing users to get in these cases and also adding more meaningful, actionable error messages.

Despite the fact you remove card references in the layouts (or layout references in collections), unless you publish the changes in the layout (collection) you will not be allowed to unpublish the card or layout you want (you'll get an update failed error).

We want to address this, yet in the meantime, the approach that will always work is the following:

* To unpublish a card, you need to remove all card mapping rules from the layouts using those cards, and re-publish those layouts. (If the layout status is "Published" and not "Published, Out of Date" you should be alright). Then you can proceed to unpublish your cards.

* To unpublish a layout, you need to remove all references to that layout from the collections, and re-publish those collections.  (If the collection status is "Published" and not "Published, Out of Date" you should be alright). Then you can proceed to unpublish your layouts.

The apparent complexity is due to the fact that we saw cards being potentially reused across multiple layouts, and layouts being reused by multiple collections. Do you see/use cards only as children of the layout? ( With the consequence that deleting the layout would also delete the cards ?).

Thanks,
Andrei