The Admin Page
- James Ellis-Jones
Above is shown an illustration of the Admin page. The Admin page is only accessible to the Administrators, as it provides functions that cause large scale changes to the system.
Modules Area
The Modules Area lists all the modules which have attempted to be initialised. Any for which there was an initialisation problem are shown marked as BLOCKED.
While many modules just show their name, others provide module controls. Typically these are caches. All caches provide a Reload button which reloads any cached information from the database. Some also have a Write to File button which writes out the cached data to a binary file which will then be reloaded the next time the site starts.
Change Problems Area
The Change Problems area shows any potentially dangerous changes in the content types which the system has detected. The Admin button on the CMS bar becomes red in order to warn to any admin or editor that these issues exist and need to be resolved. In the illustration, we see a NonBinarySerializable warning indicating that a class used as a content type or a property or subproperty of a content type has not been marked as Serializable with SerializableAttribute. This has to be corrected in code to remove this error. The second issue PropertyAddedToSummary indicates an issue which requires data to be manipulated to resolve it. Currently this issue needs to be resolved by the Field Transferer utility also on this page described below. Once this is done, click Mark as Resolved to remove this issue. Until this is done, the issue will block any changes being made to the items of the relevant content type (in this case AppContent) so that no data is lost. See the Content Schema Module for more information.
Field Transferer
The above shows the Field Transferer section of the Admin page. This can be used to transfer where data is stored in the serialized record version. The functionality of this form is intended to be replaced by automatic corrections for change problems in the Change Problems area. Clicking a button by a change problem would cause the system to automatically resolve that problem by moving (or deleting) data.
The Content data persistence method stores summary information and non-summary content information in two separate database fields so summary information can be fetched without fetching main content data. This means that redefining a content type to have a field in the summary when it wasn't previously, or not in the summary when it was previously, requires that a process goes through all the content items to move this data from one field to another. In the example, the OtherAppsHeading property of AppContent data type is being moved from the main content data to the summary data.
The Transferer can be also used to delete field data by specifying the field to delete in Field From. It can be used to rename a field by initially adding a field with the new name without deleting the field with the old name, then transferring the data from one to the other when the CMS is running connected to the relevant database, then the old field can be safely removed.