Adding custom messages to the publish dialog in Sitecore

Sitecore has pretty sophisticated event handling and pipeline hooks functionality built in. What this means is that almost any area of the user experience can be changed to provide a more customized user experience, tailored to the business needs of the users of the Sitecore implementation. This can be done very easily by writing your own code/class, and then wiring it up using the configuration directives. Event handlers are the easiest to implement – what you need to do is make your own class, define your own method in that class, then just add your include config file with the method/class for that event:


<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <events>
      <event name="publish:end">
        <handler patch:after="handler[@type='Sitecore.Publishing.HtmlCacheClearer, Sitecore.Kernel']" type="CustomClassName, CustomAssemblyName" method="CustomMethodName" />
      </event>
    </events>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

In your method, you get what item is being published and what language is being published from the publisher options. Note that the event triggers once for each language and target combination.


Sitecore.Publishing.Publisher p = (Sitecore.Publishing.Publisher)((Sitecore.Events.SitecoreEventArgs)args).Parameters[0];
Item itemBeingPublished = p.Options.RootItem;
Language languageBeingPublished = p.Options.Language;
Database targetDatabase = p.Options.TargetDatabase.Name

There a myriad of events available (http://sdn.sitecore.net/Articles/API/Using%20Events.aspx)- in this post, I’m concentrating on customizing the publish:end event to add messages to the dialog at the end of the publish job. The publish dialog shows informational content about what was published in the job:

The publish dialog at the end of the publish job

Depending on how complex your publish:end code is, you may want to add some informational text here, to show that whatever you tried to do was successful, or not, or just output some information about what it did. Adding to this message stack is done like so:


var publishJobs = Sitecore.Jobs.JobManager
                    .GetJobs().Where(x => x.Category.Equals("publish"))
                    .ToList();

                foreach (Job j in publishJobs)
                {
                    if (j.Handle.IsLocal)
                    {
                        j.Status.Messages.Add(System.Environment.NewLine + "Your custom message goes here." + System.Environment.NewLine);
                    }

                }

You can add this at any point in your code for the event handler, and it will show in the final screen. If you are throwing exceptions in your code, however, it will show in the screen before this, where it will show the message of the exception. I usually found it cleaner to show it on the final screen, and I also don’t want to interrupt the actual publishing of the items. This is for a publish:end event, so it happens after the publish event is complete, so the actual items are already published. Depending on your scenario, you may want to kill the publishing and interrupt it, in which case an exception may work better. Once added, your message will show like this: