FPWC and blocks

A while ago I needed to implement a module that simplified should find pages, where a certain person was set as responsible, and do stuff to them. A responsible person corresponds to a page reference value stored in a localblock page reference property on each page.

Ok never tried FPWC with blocks so I Googled and found Alf Nilsson’s excellent post on the subject. Seemed simple enough so I went on and implemented the module but when I started to test it I couldn’t get it to work. 

I quickly narrowed it down to the FPWC call which for some reason didn’t return any hits. At first I thought I hade done some simple typo error when creating the criteria but no.

After a bit to much time debugging I found out that the problem was that the page reference property I was searching for was placed in a block.

I reported it to the support which first confirmed it as a bug but later canceled the bug as this behavior was by design. The reason is that FPWC hasn’t been refactored to support new content types. In Alfs blog post he searches for a string property and this actually works but this is not intended behavior.

So If you in the beginning of a project have known functions that you plan to solve by FPWC and page reference properties it might be best to avoid placing those page reference properties in a block.