Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only one

Message Boards

S N, modified 3 Years ago.

Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only one

New Member Posts: 13 Join Date: 6/3/20 Recent Posts

Trying to upgrade from Liferay 6.2 to 7.2. We ran the DB upgrade tool and Liferay is able to start up.

We have a page with 3 instances of webcontent portlet added, with different content pieces configured in each of them. All 3 content pieces seem to be migrated to 7.2 properly, because they are visible in the Liferay Admin console's "Web Content" page. The "preview" option also works, so they are able to render. In "view usages" I can even see that the content pieces are being referred from the page in question, as expected.

But when I go to the page itself, it shows only ONE of these 3 webcontent portlet instances. The other two instances don't even show the webcontent portlet frame (i.e. the bar with the Look and Feel, Configuration etc options), let alone the content. There are no errors in the logs either, when the page loads.
What could be the reason for this? In the existing 6.2 instance all 3 webcontent portlets are visible and display the contents properly.

S N, modified 3 Years ago.

RE: Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only

New Member Posts: 13 Join Date: 6/3/20 Recent Posts

Could someone please respond ? If this is a bug or something ( I doubt it ) it might block us from moving to Liferay 7.2

Alberto Chaparro Terleira, modified 3 Years ago.

RE: Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only

Liferay Master Posts: 549 Join Date: 4/25/11 Recent Posts

Hi S N,
You can review a few things to know what it is happening:

Check the upgrade.log for errors during the process
Compare the portletPreferences record for those portlet instances before and after the upgrade to see if the preferences have been lost
Is this happening in other pages too? Which kind of portlets are the affected ones?

I hope it helps.

S N, modified 3 Years ago.

RE: Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only

New Member Posts: 13 Join Date: 6/3/20 Recent Posts

Hello Alberto,
Thanks for your response! Based on your comments, I did some analysis but couldn't identify anything unusual.

Check the upgrade.log for errors during the process

I found two kinds of errors in the log - missing image file errors and search index update failures. The content pieces in question do not use any images though.

Compare the portletPreferences record for those portlet instances before and after the upgrade to see if the preferences have been lost

No preferences have been lost, a few new ones have been added though. I tried to make the portlet preferences of the non-rendered portlet instances similar to the correctly rendered one, but still no luck.

Is this happening in other pages too? Which kind of portlets are the affected ones?

So far I've noticed this only with the webcontent portlet (and only on migrated pages). I don't think we have multiple instances of another portlet added to the same page unfortunately.

S N, modified 3 Years ago.

RE: Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only

New Member Posts: 13 Join Date: 6/3/20 Recent Posts

Folks, is there anything else I can try here please? Or at least, is there any logging I can turn on to see the flow ? i.e. how it loads the portlets to display, which queries are run against Liferay DB etc (I know how to configure logging in general, but which class / level should I configure for seeing this info, specifically)

S N, modified 3 Years ago.

RE: Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only (Answer)

New Member Posts: 13 Join Date: 6/3/20 Recent Posts

Solved! The issue turned out to be much sillier than I'd expected. The page in question was using a 3-column custom layout in 6.2 and the "missing" webcontent portlets were configured in the 3rd column. The custom layout was part of a theme which didn't get deployed properly in the new Liferay 7.2 instance, so Liferay fell back to a 2-column layout, and the portlets in the 3rd column were simply ignored.

I looked at the LAYOUT table's TYPESETTINGS column value to figure this out. That's what has the configuration of how the portlets are laid out. Since the theme still is work in progress, I manually edited this value to put all the column 3 portlets into column 2, and they all display correctly now. Cheers!

Alberto Chaparro Terleira, modified 3 Years ago.

RE: Upgrading 6.2->7.2, page with multiple webcontent instances shows only

Liferay Master Posts: 549 Join Date: 4/25/11 Recent Posts

Great S N, thanks for sharing it!