Accepted, Not Yet Planned

Give feedback in the GUI when trying to publish without a mapping

When someone tries to publish something and there is no mapping present, all they see is an empty "Items to publish" list. My first thought was that it would be helpful to show a message like "You can't publish from this publication because there is no mapping to a web site. Either it's your fault for trying something that shouldn't have worked, or you should find someone that can accept the technical blame for this and berate them severely."

My second thought was that perhaps the existence of a mapping could be taken in to consideration when calculating whether to allow a publish action in the first place. Even that's not ideal, because it doesn't give any hint as to the solution either. So please do something better than either of my ideas. 

Dominic Cronin

  • In Web 8 the publishing queue should now show a warning on items with an empty transaction (rather than "success," which is misleading though possibly technically correct). For now this should help give some type of feedback to users. Edit: this might not apply to items without a mapping. We'll try to work on this before the next on-premise release.

    But yes, I think we could improve this behavior. Two catches to work out are child Publications, which may be mapped for a given purpose even if a publishable parent isn't, plus the publishing options that control this behavior. Maybe a solution could be surfacing the child publications explicitly?

    Update (Oct 14, 2016): we haven't addressed this yet. We'll try to revisit based on next year's priorities. In the mean time, implementers should take care to map Publications to minimize this issue for editors.