Upgrading Site - Old Controls Can't Be Removed

I upgraded a site from 3.7 to 4.0 RC and then again to 4.0 RTM.

I've faced several issues (what's up with the external page URL no longer an option?!), and my main issue at this point is that I have several pages with references to old controls with old namespaces, but cannot delete them from the page as there seems to be an error on it that prevents any further communication with the server.

Has anyone run across this?  What's the best route to handle it?  Do I have to delete the entire page and recreate it?!  We'll have some very unhappy clients if that's the case...though I'm sure that their excitement over the new UI will help mitigate any major problems :)  Looks great guys - way to go!

Sam Ferrise
Firefly Logic
sam.ferrise@fireflylogic.com

Hi,

I have occured the same issue. We had custom breadcrumb and after renaming the control the pages stopped working. You can't even edit them.

//Kiril

Kiril--

I filed a support ticket for this issue, and gave the Telerik engineers our test case.  If they don't post the solution on here, I'll follow up and make sure to do so. 

One thing that I haven't done yet, but will this afternoon is to try different browsers.  I'm wondering if it's a simple javascript issue that the browser [Chrome] saw and killed execution.  So far that's my assumption...but why you get in that state in the first place is the real problem and that's up to Telerik to figure out.

If you come across a workaround or would like to chat further about the issue - let me know.

Sam

Hi Sam,

Sitefinity 4.0 does not support external pages yet. This feature will be available in the next couple of weeks.

Also, the APIs for 3.7 and 4.0 are completely different - they have almost nothing in common in fact. So you can't simply use your old code from 3.7, you would need to rewrite it using the new API and namespaces.

We'll investigate the issue with deleting custom controls from the pages.

All the best,

Hi Lupi, as I wrote in my response to the support ticket, I'm going to post that info here as well:

Thanks for the reply Lupi, I'm glad that you found a direction for us to continue on.

With regard to the namespaces, I do understand that everything has changed.  The problem is that I haven't had a chance to audit the site for things that need attention due to the migration because I can't remove any controls from any of the pages.  Once I can do that, I can easily re-write our controls, and actually, I'm looking forward to using the new fluent API that you guys designed.  So far I think it flows very nicely.

Essentially the way I see what's going on is that in the editor view, when it cannot correctly render a control, it displays a message and then something happens to where we have no more control over editing that page whatsoever.  If I can remove the control, I can fix the problem, it's just that we cannot remove the control.

I haven't yet had a chance to check out the data migration and I'm hoping that went well, but I can't know until I can navigate throughout the site.

We've found a workaround (it's dirty, but works for now) using javascript in the page body to force a redirection when the user hits a page that would really live outside of Sitefinity.  I know it's not a best practice, but it's the only way I could get those pages to function properly.

I've got two quick questions for you:

1.  Is there an upgrade or patch that we'll be downloading for these 4.0 fixes and additions?
2.  When I have a Sitefinity 3.7 control (say a breadcrumb) in a page, I also can't edit or delete that.  I would have assumed that the migration tool would either remove the control or throw an error...or Sitefinity 4.0 would let you remove legacy controls from 3.7.  We're not only having issues with removing custom controls to re-write them, we're having problems removing old Sitefinity controls as well.

Basically at this point, we're not going to invest any more time into a 4.0 migration until we can get some of these issues worked out.  Of course, with any new release (especially one that was redesigned like yours), there are going to be issues and we're completely empathetic with that.  

Thanks again,

Sam Ferrise
Firefly Logic
sam.ferrise@fireflylogic.com

We are currently in the process building a large site using 3.7.  As part of that we have already built over 30 custom controls.  We were want to upgrade to 4.0, but by the sounds of it, all of those custom controls would need to be scraped and rewritten.  Is there a fix in the works for that?   That will be a major factor if we decide to move forward with the upgrade or not.  

Thanks,
Paul

Hi Sam,

If your custom controls rely on the old Sitefinity 3.7 API and namespaces then you have to rewrite the controls. The migration tool cannot port C# code from the old API to the new one. The tool migrates data only.  We apologize for the inconvenience.