How to force a Live Url (AbsoluteUrl) to update on a Kentico page type

Question

I'm looking for information about how the Live Url (Absolute Url on the back end) regenerates and what triggers it to update.

Using Kentico 12SP MVC I have a pretty normal NewsArticle page type that uses a custom url pattern of "/news/{% UrlSlug %}" to route to an article. It was previously using AliasPath but because the content editors wanted the ability to create slugs that would be longer than the 50 character limit we created a custom field for it.

On any page that I create from scratch and many newer pages that I've edited this works out just fine and changing the UrlSlug to the desired (very long) slug updates the url. On a huge number of older articles though it appears that changing the UrlSlug has no effect on the Live Url. On many the url has changed to just "/news/" and others it's still showing as the old url (based on NodeAlias). I can still route to the page by hand typing the UrlSlug based url, but I've been using the TreeNode.AbsoluteUrl which is based on the Live Url (afaik) to generate menus and sitemap items and those are all still refusing to update on a large portion of our articles.

Hopefully someone knows how to force them to all regenerate or at least has a clue why some would be working and others not.

Answer 1

The "Live URL" displayed on the Page "General" tab is sourced from CMS.DocumentEngine.DocumentURLProvider.GetAbsoluteLiveSiteURL(TreeNode node);

Eventually that calls out to DocumentURLProvider.GetUrlInternal(TreeNode node);

You can override this with a custom DocumentURLProvider by registering a custom provider.

This would let you call the base.GetUrlInternal(node) and see what that is returning.

One conditional that is checked in the original DocumentURLProvider is NodeIsContentOnly, which is in the CMS_Tree table.

So I would check and make sure that all the pages with issues have this set to true (1 in the db column), otherwise the traditional Portal Engine Live URL generation takes effect.

At no point is there any 'regeneration' of Live URLs. What is displayed is coming from the values of the Page Type configuration (URL Pattern), the Node in the db, and the value populating the Macro Expression in your URL Pattern.