Tips for managing WebrCommon files

Today’s post is short and sweet and I hope will save you a headache or two down the road. It’s related to managing the contents of your WebrCommon directory.

Tip #1
As most of you have already upgraded to Extranet 5.6 or are actively working your way there, it’s a good opportunity to emphasize that the best way to add or update your WebrCommon files is through Site Designer. This is especially true with Extranet 5.6 because, as of that release, the Click Commerce Extranet framework actually manages two locations for the WebrCommon files. In the past you were able to get away with simply dropping files directly into appropriate directory in the Windows file system. With the addition of the new location, this isn’t enough and can lead you to scratching your head about why your newly updated custom.css file doesn’t seem to be working. If you drag the file into Site Designer, on the other hand, all the locations are updated correctly. More information about the changes to WebrCommon in Extranet 5.6 can be found in this article: HOWTO: Manage the Webrcommon Directory in Extranet 5.6

Even in Extranet 5.5.3, there are benefits to dragging and dropping in Site Designer. Using this approach instead of direct file system access will avoid issues related to WebrCommon files that have their file attributes or permissions set in such a way as to break backup/restore or use within your site. Dropping the files into WebrCommon via Site Designer causes them to set up correctly.

It’s as easy as Drag-and-Drop.

Tip #2
Since you are updating the contents of your WebrCommon directory, I can safely assume that you are doing this in your development store that is integrated with Source Control (right?…please tell me I’m right!). This means that any new files need to be added to your version repository as well. In most cases, Process Studio is the tool you use to do this, but there is one exception and that is with Binary files such as images. In the case of binary files you should use the Visual Source Safe client directly to add or update them. This is because Process Studio makes the assumption that files are textual. This assumption doesn’t work too well when they aren’t and can result in images not looking right. Once in source control, however, there are no concerns about them being included in your next configuration update and being correctly applied to your test and production stores. Support for binary files will be added to Process Studio with the release of Extranet 6.0.

Cheers!