Kentico - New fields on existing document types won't render

1
votes

In Kentico 7, I added 3 new fields to the Page (menu item) document type: small_desc, long_desc and icon_class - this is in addition to the existing fields MenuItemID, MenuItemName and MenuItemTeaserImage.

enter image description here

On a Repeater WebPart I added the following transformation:

<li class="...">
    <a class="<%# Eval("icon_class") %>" href="<%# GetDocumentUrl() %>">
        <%# Eval("MenuItemName") %>
    </a>
    <p class="..."><%# Eval("small_desc") %></p>
</li>

A strange thing happens. While viewing the page with the Repeater in Preview mode, everything renders correctly:

<li class="...">
    <a class="unique_class" href="/url.htm">
        Document Title
    </a>
    <p class="...">A description I just added to the document.</p>
</li>

But in Live mode, I see:

<li class="...">
    <a class="" href="/url.htm">
        Document Title
    </a>
    <p class="..."></p>
</li>

So...

We've run through a plethora of troubleshooting steps...

  • there are absolutely no exceptions in our Event Log
  • everything is checked in
  • server cache cleared
  • application restarted
  • browser cache cleared and hard reloaded on multiple browsers and machines

My assumption was Kentico didn't like it when you add new fields to existing (Kentico default) document types. I cloned a completely new document type earlier, added all brand spanking new fields, ran a repeater on a list of new documents, and every single field showed up. I'm certain I could do that - just clone Page (menu item) and recreate all of my pages, but for (I hope) obvious reasons I'm not going to do that. Kentico Support hasn't been able to give any good direction so I turn to you smart folks!

1
repeatercustom-fieldskentico
I'm not sure what's happening there bro. I just recreated your steps to a tee and didn't have any issue. The only other thing that may be happening is if you have the web part cached (under performance in the repeater's settings), but if you cleared the server cache that shouldn't be a problem now. Maybe double check that your data is actually in the DB??? Who knows, could have saved over it - like if you have the staging module set-up and at some point sync'ed another doc from another server. - Jerreck
It may seems a little bit silly but can you resign (security signatures) all the webparts from the settings security section and see. - Raymond A
Any chance your document is under workflow? Or perhaps was in the past? Does it happen for newly created document? - mivra
@Jerreck, made sure all the cache's are off, all server cache settings under SiteManager Performance are turned off (this is our dev environment, we pretty much turn every kind of cache off). We checked and the data isn't even being saved to the DB. Any new changes to original columns will update but the new columns will show NULL. That's definitely our problem, but even Kentico support can't tell us why that data is not saving but existing columns WILL update. And creating/cloning new doctypes from scratch don't seem to have this issue at all. - Phil Tune
@Raymond, could you explain that a bit for me? I'm trying anything and everything. - Phil Tune

1 Answers

1
votes

What are the columns set in the repeater's Columns property? Isn't it possible that there are set some of them and you are missing the new ones? If it is blank, all the columns should be loaded (not good for performance though).