Release Notes - EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1

This document contains notes about the changes in EPiServer CMS 5 SP1. For release informaton regarding EPiServer CMS 5 R2, please refer to the Release Notes for EPiServer CMS 5 R2 .

Deployment Center

Installation and upgrade of EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1 is done with EPiServer Deployment Center. This is slightly different compared to EPiServer CMS 5 R2, which was installed with EPiServer Installation Manager.

The Deployment Center is an upgrade of Installation Manager (EPiServer CMS 5 R2), which enables the installation and maintenance of other EPiServer modules and packages. Through the Deployment center it is now possible to install modules onto Web sites from compressed files. Further information about installation and deployment of EPiServer CMS can be read in the EPiServer CMS Installation and Deployment System Overview.

Breaking Changes

Breaking Change - Validation of Property Names
There is one breaking change in EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1 regarding the validation of property names. Note that this breaking change only affects Web sites with property names containing "illegal" characters when the property settings are edited in Admin mode.

Property names are now validated when they are edited. This validation means that the property names must begin with a letter and can only contain alphanumerical characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9), "-" and "_". This has been changed to solve an existing bug, but it also improves the HTML code in the EPiServer CMS user interface.

The effect of this is that when upgrading to EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1, any properties that have a property name containing "illegal" characters must be deleted if the property is edited. If a property name is changed, the templates that use that property must also be updated.

Breaking Change - (Custom) Event Handlers that create pages during the Mirroring Import

This breaking change is regarding how the property ”PageSaved” is handled during mirroring. Previously the data access layer always sets the property “PageSaved” when a page has been saved (regardless if the page was part of a mirroring or not). Now when pages are saved during mirroring “PageSaved” is not set by data access layer, instead the value from the page in the mirroring package is used. The reason why we did this change was that in order for pages to have the same timestamp both at the source and the target site, we can then at later mirroring jobs use this information and avoid resaving pages that have not been changed.

This change concerns those who have written event handlers that create “own” pages during the mirroring import (pages not part of the mirroring package). These pages will most probably fail to save resulting in an Sql exception stating SqlDateTime overflow.

The workaround (which requires a compilation of code) is to add a line before they call DataFactory.Instance.Save as below:
newPage[”PageSaved”] = BaseLibrary.Context.Current.Now;

Minor Problem in Edit Mode After Upgrading

It has been reported that after upgrading to EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1 occasionally when entering Edit mode the Web site's page tree structure may appear erroneous. If this occurs a correct page tree structure will be produced either by refreshing the browser or by deleting the browser's cache.

New and Enhanced Functionality

EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1 mainly contains bug fixes and no new functionality. A list of issues that have been solved in this release is available on EPiServer World. http://world.episerver.com/bugs (partner access required).

SDK

We have now published parts of the EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1 source code in the SDK. We hope that by making certain parts of the source code available to EPiServer CMS developers will assist developers in creating even better EPiServer solutions. The source code for the following classes has been made available in this release: PageBase, UserControlBase, PageData, Global, Configuration Settings, PageReference.

Updated Documentation in EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1

The following technotes have been added in EPiServer CMS 5 R2 SP1: