Question

I have a use case where I need to add information about the user that created the current publish transaction (more than just their user name, I also need group memberships and some other details) and pass it on to a deployer extension.

When publishing this is relatively easy to do with the following code

engine.PublishingContext.RenderedItem.AddInstruction(
                                      InstructionScope.Global, instruction);

As you may notice this method “AddInstruction” is only available for a “RenderedItem”, but Unpublish instructions do not render items, and therefore I cannot use the same technique.

Short of hacking the package manifest in the file system when generating it (for instance in a custom resolver) how would you tackle this requirement?

Answer 1

Do you have more info on what you need to do with this information in the Deployer. Would it be an option to capture the un-publish action after it happens with an event handler, and then create a second publish action which sends the message to the Deployer with the additional information? (I know that means 2 round trips, but I can’t think of another approach at this point). Un-publish actions have been a bit tricky ever since R4, back in R3 we actually had code which was executed by templates in the unpublish phase (although it was all Perl back then).