Global Elements - take one

[kjac]

Prerequisites

• I have added steps to test this contribution in the description below

Description

This is the first part of the Global Elements feature. It is not feature complete, but the foundation is in place, and we believe it makes the most sense to carry on development in smaller feature branches off v18/dev.

[AndyButland]

I've given this a fairly thorough once-over, within reason for what's a big PR and one with work still to do once merged, and plenty of lead time before release. It looks very good and thorough, and almost everything I can see might be missing is marked with a TODO and hence known.

There are some missing things that I'll detail here, but so long as these are considered and tracked I don't see any reason why they shouldn't come in smaller, subsequent PRs.

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Potentially missing management API controllers which should be considered (from comparing with the implementation for documents):

• Documents have a GetAuditLogDocumentController but we don't have the equivalent for elements.
• Documents have a SearchDocumentItemController but we don't have the equivalent for elements.
• Documents have a SortDocumentController - I guess we don't need this for elements, but should the folders support it? Maybe not necessary as the numbers should be much lower.
• Document have controllers in the Umbraco.Cms.Api.Management.Controllers.Document.References namespace, but we don't have equivalents for elements.
  • As well as the details of references on the "Info" workspace view, these are also needed to support the configuration DisableDeleteWhenReferenced and DisableUnpublishWhenReferenced.

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One clarifying question - what's the plan for "element types" here? I.e. document, media and member have document, media and member types. Are elements going to be made from document types with "is element" selected still?

If so, I see validation on create/update element is still to do, but this should check the provided type is an element.

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Scheduled publishing of elements doesn't look to be hooked up yet. This is triggered from ScheduledPublishingJob calling _contentService.PerformScheduledPublish(), but there's no equivalent for elements implemented yet.

Similarly ContentVersionCleanupJob only calls IContentVersionService.PerformContentVersionCleanup(). The equivalent on IElementVersionService isn't called.

Webhooks aren't implemented - i.e. there's no equivalent of ContentSavedWebhookEvent used for documents.

[kjac]

Thanks, @AndyButland

I'll dig into the concrete suggestions later.

As for your remarks:

Potentially missing management API controllers which should be considered (from comparing with the implementation for documents)

Excellent points. The current backlog contains tasks to resolve them 👍

One clarifying question - what's the plan for "element types" here?

We will continue to use the current setup with a boolean flag on document types, even if it would be more ideal to have dedicated element types like we have media types. Introducing dedicated element types (and handling all the subsequent migration) is a potential future project with a LOT of implications that need hashing out first.

Scheduled publishing of elements doesn't look to be hooked up yet. This is triggered from ScheduledPublishingJob calling _contentService.PerformScheduledPublish(), but there's no equivalent for elements implemented yet.
Similarly ContentVersionCleanupJob only calls IContentVersionService.PerformContentVersionCleanup(). The equivalent on IElementVersionService isn't called.
Webhooks aren't implemented - i.e. there's no equivalent of ContentSavedWebhookEvent used for documents.

Good catch. Some of this is already in the backlog, some is not. I will create tasks.