Challenge:
Since Sitecore 8.2 there is a hidden gem which allows you to do workflow bundling.
Workflow bundling means – When you move a page from one state to another using Experience editor only. All the associated component’s data sources on that page also move along with the page.
I’m surprised that this is not very well documented feature :
Following blog post has done good job outlining this (Thanks jammykam)
https://jammykam.wordpress.com/2016/09/05/sitecore-8-2-managing-datasource-components-and-workflow-from-the-experience-editor/ – Refer to “Workflow Bundling” section
If you don’t want to read the above post then for you – This flag controls workflow bundling behavior (Default value is true): “WebEdit.AffectWorkflowForDatasourceItem”
We have been happily using this functionality. But it stopped working and we couldn’t easily figure out when that happened as we were in between of new implementation.
If same is going on with you guys/girls as well. Then this post is for you!
Solution:
We started tracking all changes we made around this feature and we figured out that we had to disable comments as per our client’s request:
And that change was causing this behavior – Where, If we enable comment then it will work, and as soon as we disable comment it stopped working.
We raised the Sitecore support ticket and after some back and forth. Finally, Sitecore support was able to reproduce the issue and registered this as a bug (#452470). Unfortunately, there is no hotfix to fix this.
You must have to keep Workflow comments enabled (Which is as such a good practice) to use workflow bundling.
Hope this helps you figure out why your workflow bundling stopped working! 🙂
One more thing, There is also another bug with this feature where it doesn’t approve children items of a data source – https://trnktms.com/2018/03/20/webedit-affectworkflowfordatasourceitems-collect-datasource-children-items/ (“by default, this only collects the data source items and does not the children items of a data source. This is an issue when you have something like a list component which shows the children items”)
Happy Workflow bundling! 🙂
Sitecore basics! 