Shared Content Page Lock Issue

So if you have a shared content block that is used on multiple pages and the content is then changed while any of those pages is locked the shared content block that is on the locked pages is not updated and furthermore the link between that content on the locked page(s) to the shared block is broken.  This makes no sense to me why it would occur unless you are pushing the changes to each page rather than having one location that you are storing the content in that is referenced by the content block and when the page is constructed, pulling the information from there (similar to how modules work).  If this is the case, shared content becomes more of a pain than a useful tool as we have multiple people working on pieces of content and having a change like that not propagate to all pages is unacceptable.  This seems to also be true with templates, but I have not tested that enough to confirm it.  

Cheers, 
Marc

Hello Marc,

I've tested the scenario and didn't get any unexpected behavior. Here are the steps I followed. Please correct me if I somehow avoided the issue.
1. I have two users - admin - owner of the page and creator of the content block, and User with an Editor role.
2. Admin creates a content block and shares it on a page. Locks the page and modifies the content block. As a result a dialog comes out that says: 1 page has been successfully updated. Admin then goes back to the page, which is now unlocked and the changes have been applied to it.
3. Log in as User, while the page is been locked. Try to make changes to the content block, which leads to a pop-up: Pages below could not be updated with the latest content because they need to be approved first. This message is expected since a locked page practically means that  the page is been used by another user at the moment. Hence, its content can't be modified by two different users at the same time.
4. I then log back as Admin and unlock the page, which enables User to make changes to the content block and those changes are now applied.
This is link to a video that covers all steps. Let me know if the issue in reproduced under different circumstances.

Greetings,
Jen Peleva
the Telerik team

This makes shared content almost useless in a big environment.  We have pieces of content that are shared between 100's of pages  We have just created a module instead that is just a html field, title and categories.  It is better this way anyway since we can dictate more visual changes, localization, ect.  Thanks for th info though.   

What are you guys talking about?

@Marc - how many shared content blocks do you have in your site and have you noticed a performance hit  (in the admin and end user) as a result?

We had some shared content blocks that are distributed throughout hundreds of pages and had about 10 or 20 total unique shared content blocks. We did at least at one time, but have since just built a simple module that has a title and content block inside of it to eliminate the issues we were running into.  The performance hit is on modifying a content block that is distributed across multiple pages as an update to a content block is pushed to each page that it is used on.  This also caused on issue of a certain page had a shared content block on it and that page was being modified by one of our admin users while the shared content block was being changed by another user it did not persist the change to the shared content to the page(s) that were being modified.   This was unacceptable in our eyes although it would tell us after a long time the pages that were not being updated.  We did not see a performance hit on the front end servers using shared content block.  But the management of a shared content block becomes unusable in our eyes. By abstacting it to a module we eliminated this issue and it only took about 4 to 8 hours to build out the module properly.  It also added all features the module comes with, which we felt were huge gains in functionality. 

Hi Marc. If you have any pointers for us, please email me: ptenberg@reading.org

Hi Marc. We have the same problem after we upgraded from 3.7 to 4.4. We share content across hundreds of pages and our site crashes after we do shared content update. We also get the same problem when more than one user makes content update at the same time. I agree with your statement that this bug makes Sitefinity pretty useless in a big environment.

I am extremely puzzled by Sitefinity's statement that they are not aware of it/can't reproduce it. For us this problem is critical and we are considering either rolling back to 3.7 or looking for other CSM systems. We certainly hope that Sitefinity comes up with some sort of answer to it (either patch, workaround or address it in new version). At this point - any information would help.

I am also surprised that you came up with your own solution under 8 hours - I am hoping that Sitefinity will buy it from you and share with the rest of us :). We are a non-profit company dedicated to reading and literacy so any pointers, hints or other hand-ups you can give us on your solution would be HUGELY appreciated!