Anyone else seeing default layout settings change in Gold R5

[AbleMods]

I'm having problems with Gold R5 not keeping assigned page layout settings. I can't figure out what's causing them to revert back to default.

I change Webpages and categories. They stick. I refresh the page. They stay. 15-20 minutes after working on other pages in other parts of the store, suddenly the home page is wonky.

I go into admin and sure enough, page layouts for category and webpages are no longer set correctly - they've reverted to the default assignments.

I'm just doing programming on certain user controls, not changing master files or layout files or anything. Not even going into the admin until I have to reset the layouts again.

Any ideas or thoughts? It's driving me nuts....

[jmestep]

I wonder if there was a bug introduced with the new code to pass parameters to conlibs?
We have an R3 site that is upgrading to R5 so we might hear something about it from them- they are doing their own design.

[ForumsAdmin]

Strange. We haven't seen/heard anything like this happening before. We will investigate and let you know.

[Katie]

This almost sounds like a bug we fixed in R4 (build 5410):

[AC8-1630] - Changes to category and webpage default layouts are not getting applied.

Joe, can you confirm you have the latest files for R5? Check ~/Category.aspx.cs and ~/Webpage.aspx.cs

Thanks,
Katie

[AbleMods]

I remember that too. I think in that case, the layouts weren't getting applied overall. In this case, the layouts are storing and getting applied, but then later the settings revert to the default values.

Confirmed, files you listed are what we are running. They match identical to R5 release files.

Default layout settings are changing in ac_StoreSettings. So it's getting committed to the disk somewhere. I just can't nail down where, i.e. what sequence of steps is causing them to revert.

Earlier this morning, I noticed I had TWO sets of layout settings in the ac_StoreSettings table. There should only ever be 1 set of values. So I cleared both sets, re-assigned them again in admin and double-checked only 1 set of values got stored to the table. Looked ok.

I'm continuing to watch...

[AbleMods]

I think it was the Lucene. Staging site continued to throw exceptions trying to save default layout settings until I switched to SQL provider. Kept complaining about null values, yet the settings would save. My other developers install never showed the problem with his copy of the database.

If it was the Lucene, I'm not going to be a happy man. Every single project it bites me when I go to load a project into a client production environment. Either the catalog disappears entirely freaking everyone out, or weird stuff starts happening with no logical explanation.

And since the search-setting is database based, copying the site files does not transplant the current search provider setting.

[Katie]

When using Lucene, you might need to use the Website > Index feature to rebuild the index after making changes.

If your product or order searches are not returning expected results, or if results do not seem to be properly sorting according to relevance, the search index may need to be rebuilt. This process can be time consuming if you have a lot of products, users, and/or orders so this should be done at an off-peak time.

I'm not sure of the benefits to using Lucene over SQL search, but after doing a little research on Lucene, it seems that we are not the only ones complaining of problems.

Katie

[jmestep]

Joe- does your client have access to the site you are working on? We had one client who kept fooling around in the admin breaking code our developer was doing. We finally hid the admin layout/stylesheet pages until we were done with the site. We spent several hours fixing things and wondering if we had gremlins before we found out what they were doing.
Katie- depending on the number of items in a website, it takes a while to rebuild the index after a site move, etc. If the SQL Server bugs are fixed in R5, we are going to use that instead of Lucene.

[AbleMods]

That's a good possibility Judy but I know that wasn't the case on my own machine.

Katie I think a big help would be simply making SQL the default provider on new installs.

[Katie]

Katie I think a big help would be simply making SQL the default provider on new installs

Done.

[jmestep]

Julie, who does design implementation, has confirmed this problem. I switched the site to SQL search and her changes are sticking now.
I'm going to post a bug report in case there isn't one already.

[Katie]

Hi Judy,

Have you been able to confirm the problem yourself? I reported this to the dev team, but it seems we cannot reproduce the issue with Gold R5.

Thanks
Katie

[jmestep]

I haven't confirmed it for myself but I was on the phone with her when I set it to SQL search. I will try to get the time to do that. I can't remember what site she was working on but on one site a couple of days ago, she thought it was happening and the layout was botched up. It turned out that the problem there was bad html in the product description.

[jmestep]

I did test this a little locally and ran across a few products where they were showing center content and right nav, after I had set the product page layout to have a menu in the left nav. In this case, there were no subcategories under the category, so the left nav disappeared visualy. I added the send product to a friend in the left nav and the product layout showed three columns, just no menu in the left nav because of having no subcategories.
I've got a coded UI test set up in Visual Studio and I'll run that many times while I'm off doing other things.

[Katie]

Using the SimpleCategoryList control seems to get a lot of merchants confused because it will only appear in certain conditions, and never on a product page. Then the merchant thinks that the layout isn't working because it doesn't show up. It might be a good idea to have another category control that outputs the main categories for the store, and then it could be used on any page. What do you think?

[AbleMods]

I think a lot of people would benefit from a category tree control that shows the whole catalog tree all the time, and expands the catalog for the current categoryId. Like I have on Solunar.com.

Only showing the sub-categories of the current categoryId often leads to confusion, because the only way back up the tree is via breadcrumbs. One way in, a different way out sort of thing.

Reminds me of my second divorce...

[Katie]

I agree this would be a great feature, so I went ahead and put in the request.

Thanks for your input.

Katie

[jmestep]

The site I was working on had the simple category list in the left nav (I had put the simple category list in the left nav for the product page), but it didn't show because the category the product was in didn't have subcategories. I think in Able 7, it would display a message, like "there are no subcategories", but in Gold, it just looks like the left nav disappears. If the product parent category has subcategories, it shows then. I think it probably wouldn't be a problem in a live site because most merchants have something else besides the menu in the left nav.