I've used Courier lots in the past, and I've been pleasantly suprised with my experiences of Courier with Umbraco 7.
I've seen a few errors, but everything has been pretty straight forward to debug and understand.
I used Courier to move content and media from a broken (for unknown reasons) Umbraco install into a fresh install. The site in question had over 10,000 media items, so manually re-populating the site was not an option.
Courier really did save the day - kudos!
So!! Whilst using Courier, I kept some notes, and I wanted to feed these back to improve the product for other users. Hola, if this is the wrong place to post this?
If you need any more information please let me know,
Thanks again! Courier for v7 is looking like a much more stable product.
Laurence
p.s imho the default option should be transfer the selected item only, by transferring every dependency by default the scope for error is so much greater. All the items on the selected node are still resolved, so associated content/media move.
Courier Experiences
1. First Experience - Courier Failed Silently when Installed
Doh! Although Courier was available in the right click context menu & its own section. When used to transfer content it just error'd silently in the console.
Incrementing Client Dependancy version (e.g. rebuilding client dependancy) resolved the issue.
Could this be added into the installer? Auto Increment CD?
2. When transfer is successful no success message is displayed in the Pane.
3. Tap/Click away from Courier Slide Out, closes Panel and cancels operation.
This was one of my biggest frustrations!
It's SO easy to accidentally close the Courier slide out pane when transferring content. Any click or tap closes the slide out, and if you're transferring lots of content the chance of this happen is vastly increased.
When fixing this site, I had packaging operations running for hours.
I get this is part of the Umbraco UI UX, but when using Courier is just doesn't make sense to be able to close with a single rogue click.
4. Browser Becomes Unresponsive
When Courier'ing large amounts of data, the web browser can become unresponsive. I found this to happen with around 7000 items+.
The pain point is when Courier connects to the 'destination'. At this point the browser will become unresponsive, but if allowed to continue will eventually complete it's operation.
However the default behaviour in Chrome is to pause execution, so your transfer won't be successful. (e.g. if you leave it running over night, etc).
5. Large Files Fail Silently
Courier can only send the maximum file size as defined in the web.config. By default this is 4mb.
When transferring files over this size, Courier fails silently and tells the user that the transfer has been successful!!!
Suggestion: Check the size limit in the web.config and alert the user, or chunk the file using a value that is smaller than the value in the web.config.
6. Errors in console are not feedback to user
Sometimes the message returned is a 500, this causes no feedback to be displayed in the open pane. This happens after 'Deploy' is clicked.
Good stuff Laurence, thanks for taking your time to pass it on to us :)
We've been working on several parts of Courier for the pasts months, some of it has already gone into parts of Uaas, and these parts are planned to be part of Courier as well - this is especially improvements around UI - which I think is a very large portion of your frustrations are related to.
We are also working on Umbraco.Deploy - which is the next generation of Courier, it will get rid of Nhibernate, use core Umbraco services and be in sync with Umbraco Core releases, and benefit from the shared services layer.
So, we know things need improvement, and we are working on them :)
And to just address your points one by one:
yeah, this should just be part of the install, we have had the same challenges with installing forms which also needed a client dependency update to work.
Must be a bug, as that should show.
Are you sure? - the way courier does these transfers is by running them in a background thread, and the ui just reports progress, so closing pane shouldnt kill the process - I think the issue is that it doesnt properly resumes a running job when reopening - there is a task page on the courier section which should show you running tasks.
this is new to me, havnt experienced that it does this, maybe a new chrome bug introduced. :)
yeah, agree, its annoying that you are not told, we want to change the transfer model and get rid of this problem in the next version.
Not sure, what you mean here, could you give some more details?
Courier 2.50.1 Umbraco 7 - Feedback
Hi,
I've used Courier lots in the past, and I've been pleasantly suprised with my experiences of Courier with Umbraco 7.
I've seen a few errors, but everything has been pretty straight forward to debug and understand.
I used Courier to move content and media from a broken (for unknown reasons) Umbraco install into a fresh install. The site in question had over 10,000 media items, so manually re-populating the site was not an option.
Courier really did save the day - kudos!
So!! Whilst using Courier, I kept some notes, and I wanted to feed these back to improve the product for other users. Hola, if this is the wrong place to post this?
If you need any more information please let me know,
Thanks again! Courier for v7 is looking like a much more stable product.
Laurence
p.s imho the default option should be transfer the selected item only, by transferring every dependency by default the scope for error is so much greater. All the items on the selected node are still resolved, so associated content/media move.
Courier Experiences
1. First Experience - Courier Failed Silently when Installed
Doh! Although Courier was available in the right click context menu & its own section. When used to transfer content it just error'd silently in the console.
Incrementing Client Dependancy version (e.g. rebuilding client dependancy) resolved the issue.
Could this be added into the installer? Auto Increment CD?
2. When transfer is successful no success message is displayed in the Pane.
3. Tap/Click away from Courier Slide Out, closes Panel and cancels operation.
This was one of my biggest frustrations!
It's SO easy to accidentally close the Courier slide out pane when transferring content. Any click or tap closes the slide out, and if you're transferring lots of content the chance of this happen is vastly increased.
When fixing this site, I had packaging operations running for hours.
I get this is part of the Umbraco UI UX, but when using Courier is just doesn't make sense to be able to close with a single rogue click.
4. Browser Becomes Unresponsive
When Courier'ing large amounts of data, the web browser can become unresponsive. I found this to happen with around 7000 items+.
The pain point is when Courier connects to the 'destination'. At this point the browser will become unresponsive, but if allowed to continue will eventually complete it's operation.
However the default behaviour in Chrome is to pause execution, so your transfer won't be successful. (e.g. if you leave it running over night, etc).
5. Large Files Fail Silently
Courier can only send the maximum file size as defined in the web.config. By default this is 4mb.
When transferring files over this size, Courier fails silently and tells the user that the transfer has been successful!!!
Suggestion: Check the size limit in the web.config and alert the user, or chunk the file using a value that is smaller than the value in the web.config.
6. Errors in console are not feedback to user
Sometimes the message returned is a 500, this causes no feedback to be displayed in the open pane. This happens after 'Deploy' is clicked.
Good stuff Laurence, thanks for taking your time to pass it on to us :)
We've been working on several parts of Courier for the pasts months, some of it has already gone into parts of Uaas, and these parts are planned to be part of Courier as well - this is especially improvements around UI - which I think is a very large portion of your frustrations are related to.
We are also working on Umbraco.Deploy - which is the next generation of Courier, it will get rid of Nhibernate, use core Umbraco services and be in sync with Umbraco Core releases, and benefit from the shared services layer.
So, we know things need improvement, and we are working on them :)
And to just address your points one by one:
yeah, this should just be part of the install, we have had the same challenges with installing forms which also needed a client dependency update to work.
Must be a bug, as that should show.
Are you sure? - the way courier does these transfers is by running them in a background thread, and the ui just reports progress, so closing pane shouldnt kill the process - I think the issue is that it doesnt properly resumes a running job when reopening - there is a task page on the courier section which should show you running tasks.
this is new to me, havnt experienced that it does this, maybe a new chrome bug introduced. :)
yeah, agree, its annoying that you are not told, we want to change the transfer model and get rid of this problem in the next version.
Not sure, what you mean here, could you give some more details?
Hey Per,
Re: 6.
So when running a transfer, sometimes an error will appear in the Browser Console, e.g. a JavaScript/Request error.
If you happen to have the console open then you see the error, but if not, it fails silently.
It is possible to override the default browser implementation of console, so those errors are also available to inject into a HTML element.
I'll see if I can recreate at this end. Cheers, Lau
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