Monday, September 05, 2005

MCMS Manager 4.2

I've got plenty of feedbacks on ‘slowness’ of the current version of MCMS Manager compared with old ones. So, in this version I’ve used zip-compression to reduce the time taken for response. I hope this will be faster than the old one.

Also with MCMS Manager 4.2, ‘Local MCMS API’ can be directly accessed by leaving the web service part in the login form blank. This will be surely faster than via web service. Go to MCMS Manager Site and download the new version. Please post your feedbacks!

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Chester,
thanks for this new release.

Here are my comments:
1. As you indicated you've fixed that problem that channels/postings would only be shown 3 levels down the hierarchy. Now it works well down 7 levels which is great!!!

2. Being able to use the local API if running locally helps a lot.
a) its much, much faster
b) with the local API I don't have the problem with the statistics, search, and "using postings" not working (greyed-out) which I have when using the webservice. I love the "using postings" feature as it help quite a lot to cleanup the templates. So, no I use this is at least when running locally via API. (would be cool if I could get this to work via Webservice as well).

3. New compressions for the webserviced version seems to help performance a little but still the API works way faster.

4. On a recent comment someone had requested to be able to edit channel properties via MCMS manager. I agree this would be handy.
Further, I'd love to be able to see which template a posting is using. I know that you can display the template GUID but I didn't find a feature which tells you the template name and path used for a given posting and I don't think that sitemanager can do this either.

5. last but not least, I've just seen the following error:
See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.FormatException: Invalid character in a Base-64 string.
at System.Convert.FromBase64String(String s)
at MCMS.ZipFile.DeCompress(String compressedString)
at MCMS.CmsServiceSoapExtension.DeComp(Stream fromStream, Stream toStream)
at MCMS.CmsServiceSoapExtension.ProcessMessage(SoapMessage message)
at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapMessage.RunExtensions(SoapExtension[] extensions)
at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.ReadResponse(SoapClientMessage message, WebResponse response, Stream responseStream, Boolean asyncCall)
at System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol.Invoke(String methodName, Object[] parameters)
at MCMS.CmsServerService.CmsService.GetCmsChannels(CmsUser user, String parentGuid, String& error)
at MCMS.MCMSManager.FormMCMSManager.treeViewChannels_BeforeExpand(Object sender, TreeViewCancelEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.OnBeforeExpand(TreeViewCancelEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.TvnExpanding(NMTREEVIEW* nmtv)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.WmNotify(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

Overall, really, really cool tool and extremely helpful. And the best part is: its getting better and better ;-)

Thanks a lot!

4:18 PM  
Blogger Chester said...

Hi David,

Regarding your 3rd comment, I didn't implement that feature as is available in Site Manager. 5th comment - Can you explain me, when that exception occurred? It seems you got that error which going through the channels... But, I couldn’t reproduce that.

Thanks for your feedback!

Cheers,
Chester.

9:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Chester,
I got the error right away when I launched MCMS Manager. It seems that it started loading the channel structure when the error popped up. Interesting is that I can't reproduce it either.
David

9:59 PM  
Blogger Chester said...

Hi David,

The error seams to be related with web service compression-decompression. Anyway I'll double check that. I hope that you are using the newer version of the web service.

Cheers,
Chester.

10:05 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hehe... sure I installed the new webservice. First I uninstalled the old one and than installed the new MSI file 4.2.

Still I can't reproduce this error myself.

5:52 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Chester

I was wondering if your application called the MCMS database and/or COM layer of MCMS directly?

I have heard that this invalidates microsoft support. Does using your tool invalid microsoft support?

I currently only use your tool against our development site.

Either way this is a really useful tool!!

Thanks

Spencer

12:12 AM  

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