Media Tracking - Media isn't tracked as being 'in use' if picked in a Macro Parameter

[marcemarc]

Quite often a Macro is used to allow an editor to pick a selection of media files, and then the selection is written out in a nice list, with some custom HTML, eg icons representing the file types and the size of the file to download...

This is a big time saver for editors, and also gives you central consistent control over the markup used for these lists.

The macro would have a multiple media picker as a parameter - and allow either a 'folder' to be picked or individual media items.

I wouldn't necessarily expect media to be tracked if a 'folder' has been picked, something would need to be done with the paths and that seems a bit niche..

.. but I would expect (hope) individual media items 'picked' in a macro parameter multi media picker would be registered and tracked as being 'in use'?

Using Umbraco 8.6.1

To replicate create a new Macro called Insert Files - Give it a Macro Parameter of Multiple Media Picker... allow it to be used in Rich Text Area and the grid.

Visit a page, with a Rich Text Area, on it, insert the macro and pick some media files...

save and publish

visit the media item in the back office ... no media references tracked :-(

so and editor cannot be super confident whether something actually is or is not used...

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This item has been added to our backlog AB#6755

[nul800sebastiaan]

Sure thing, we might be missing some areas that we didn't think of, this is a good one!

I am not sure how soon we can look into this but if someone in the mean time would like to help that would be a very welcome contribution!

[umbrabot]

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[marcemarc]

@nul800sebastiaan looks like based on the 'ToDo' it would go here?

Umbraco-CMS/src/Umbraco.Web/PropertyEditors/RichTextPropertyEditor.cs

Line 163 in c63af8e

//TODO: Detect Macros too ... but we can save that for a later date, right now need to do media refs

some sort of Macro _macroParser.FindUdisFromMacroParameters ?

[marcemarc]

hmm what makes it difficult. is the embed syntax for a macro looks like this:

<!-- <?UMBRACO_MACRO macroAlias="InsertFileDownloadList" files="1142,1144,1143,1145" /> -->

so the parameter type isn't identifiable and it's not storing Udis ...

... so I think we'd have to look for any parameters that were a number or csv of numbers, then see if they were media items, then get their udis... unless we do something clever with the <?UMBRACO_MACRO syntax to include the UDIs when it builds the syntax somehow... hmm.. can see why it was skipped in order to ship!

[nul800sebastiaan]

@nul800sebastiaan looks like based on the 'ToDo' it would go here?

Umbraco-CMS/src/Umbraco.Web/PropertyEditors/RichTextPropertyEditor.cs

Line 163 in c63af8e

//TODO: Detect Macros too ... but we can save that for a later date, right now need to do media refs

some sort of Macro _macroParser.FindUdisFromMacroParameters ?

@marcemarc No that's a TODO for tracking macro references (so a list of where each macro is being used).

hmm what makes it difficult. is the embed syntax for a macro looks like this:

I think on the macro definition you'd know "files" is of type mediapicker, right?

[nul800sebastiaan]

Ah maybe that TODO was exactly what you're looking for, now I'm confused too..

[marcemarc]

Yep not everyone would call their pickers 'files' :-P

[nul800sebastiaan]

No they won't but you can look at the macro definition and find the alias files to figure out what the type of the property is.

[marcemarc]

So...

Parse the Macro in the RTE
Read the Alias of the Macro
LookUpMacro definition based on Alias - does any of it's parameters support media picking
If so, parse all the parameters, and filter out the ones that do media picking
read the values,
convert ids to udis
add to the tracking list!

[nul800sebastiaan]

And it that all could be fast.. that would be great. I think we resorted to direct database queries for a lot of the media tracking features since going through the services would slow down things too much.

Extra complication; people can write their own macro param editors, that might be relying on media items too.

[Shazwazza]

We don't resort to DB queries for media tracking. It's all just done as part of saving a document and extracting out UDIs. The responsibility of tracking is on the property editor implementation.