Resolving Conflicts
When you begin the publishing process, Liferay performs a compatibility check to determine if there are any conflicts between your publication and production. While some conflicts can be resolved automatically, others require manual resolution. Resolving all conflicts is necessary for publishing changes.
Publishing conflicts only occur when changes are made to production after changes have already been made in a publication. This is because each publication is automatically updated with changes made to production, provided those changes don’t conflict with changes made in the publication.
Automatically Resolving Conflicts
For some conflicts, Liferay can provide an automatic resolution. Essentially, an automatic resolution is a pre-configured solution to certain kinds of conflicts, so you can publish your changes without further action. These solutions may include adding, modifying, or removing content from the current publication, or replacing the version of content in production with your publication’s version.
When an automatic solution is available, you’re notified during publishing. You can then click on View to review the solution’s details. To implement an automatic solution, click on Publish.
Manually Resolving Conflicts
For some conflicts, Liferay cannot provide an automatic resolution. This means you must perform an additional action to resolve the conflict before you can finish publishing. When a manual resolution is necessary, Publications identifies the conflict type and prompts you to resolve it.
Depending on the conflict type, Publications may prompt you to perform one of two actions.
Edit: Sends you to the cause of the conflict in the current publication. From there, you can make the changes necessary to resolve the conflict.
Discard: Displays a preview of changes to be discarded. You can then click Discard to remove them from your publication permanently.
Discarding is permanent and cannot be reversed. Ensure you’ve saved any changes you want to keep before discarding them from your publication.
Conflicts on Scheduled Publications
Liferay DXP 2024.Q2+/Portal 7.4 GA120+
Scheduled publications are more susceptible to conflicts and errors, because elements in the publication may have been altered by the time they are published. When that happens, conflicts or errors may arise. Liferay tries to handle some conflicts automatically, but sometimes manual intervention is required.
Either way, when conflicts or errors arise, a notification is sent to users involved in the publication process (i.e., publishers, editors, administrators, and owners), providing details about what went wrong and what needs fixing.
To see the notifications, open the User Administration Menu and click Notifications.
If the scheduled-publications-conflict-checks is set at the Job Scheduler, a check is performed periodically to look for potential conflicts for scheduled publications. By default, the cron expression is set to midnight UTC.
If scheduled publications run into conflicts or errors, users receive notification messages whenever the conflict check runs.
Users can access a list of conflicts through the notification. There, users can both see the conflicts that were resolved automatically, and solve conflicts requiring manual resolution.
If there are Java errors unrelated to conflicts, users receive an error message notification, and owners and system administrators have access to a stack trace of errors for further investigation.
Understanding Conflict Types
Users can encounter six general types of conflicts: Duplication, Modification, Deletion Modification, Modification Deletion, Missing Requirement, and Addition.
Duplication Conflicts
These conflicts occur when something in production uses the same unique value of a change made in the publication. This can be caused by any type of component that requires a unique value (e.g., a folder, url, role name).
Consider the following example. Suppose you’ve added a new folder named “Marketing” to a publication, while a user in production creates a folder using the same name. Since folders in the same repo must have a unique name, attempting to publish your change results in a duplication conflict.
To resolve duplication conflicts, users can either edit the value in their publication, or discard their change.
Modification Conflicts
These conflicts occur when an entity you’ve modified in a publication is then modified in production (e.g., when an edited Web Content article is moved). While some modification conflicts can be automatically resolved, others require manual resolution.
To resolve modification conflicts, you can edit the conflicting material, discard the conflicting changes in your publication, or replace the version in production.
Deletion Modification and Modification Deletion Conflicts
These conflicts occur when an entity is modified in a publication and then deleted in production (Deletion Modification), or vice versa (Modification Deletion). The only provided resolution for this conflict is to discard the publication’s conflicting change.
Liferay DXP 2024.Q2+/Portal 7.4 GA120+To prevent these conflicts, avoid deleting items modified in a publication by adding thechange.tracking.deletion.protection.enabled=trueproperty to your [portal-ext.properties](../../../installation-and-upgrades/reference/portal-properties.md).
This property blocks the deletion of the item if it’s being modified in a publication, whether the deletion happens in production or in another publication.
When attempting to delete an item, an error message appears, preventing deletion.
If you are deleting an item that is deleted immediately (rather than going to the recycle bin), the deletion is blocked and an error message is shown.
However, if you are deleting an item that is moved to the recycle bin first (e.g., web content articles, blog posts, and documents), the item is moved to the recycle bin, and the message is only shown once you try to delete it from the recycle bin.
This means those items can still generate deletion conflicts even with the protection property in place.
Missing Requirement Conflicts
These conflicts occur when a child entity is created or edited in your publication, while its parent has been removed from production. Examples include deleting a folder from production when your publication adds or modifies a sub-folder.
To resolve Missing Requirement conflicts, you can discard the conflicting changes from your publication or revert the deletion in production. See Reverting Changes for how to revert changes published to production.
Addition Conflict
These conflicts only occur when users attempt to revert a publication including a deletion that has already been reverted. Users cannot revert the same publication twice if it included a deletion, since the system cannot add back what has already been added back.