Normally, when you change your website design in a Dynamic Web Template (or "DWT" for short) in Expression Web, the web editor automatically updates all the pages derived from that template when you save the modifications. I was asked by a visitor, who had been using Expression Web without problem for many months, why that suddenly stopped happening one day. "My problem," he said, "is that when I now make changes to my site template, only 9 of over two hundred pages that are linked to it are shown as still attached. Why aren't the other pages shown as attached, so that they can be updated when changes are made?"
This article answers that question.
In order to work its magic of seeming to know which files are derived from which template, and being able to automatically update all relevant pages whenever your template changes, Expression Web actually saves extra information about each file as you create them.
If you were to open up your local site folder (the copy of your website that is stored on your own computer)
in Windows Explorer, and if you have configured Windows to show you all files, even hidden ones, you may see
that it has two additional (hidden) folders which you did not manually create, namely,
"_vti_cnf" and "_vti_pvt". (Note: you will not see those folders if you have not specifically
configured Windows to show you hidden files.)
For each page that exists on your website, a special configuration file of the same name is created in the "_vti_cnf"
directory, containing information such as the links in the original file, the DWT file used, and so on. Your DWT file
also has its shadow equivalent here. It contains, among other things, a list of all the files that are attached to it
(ie, derived from it). Expression Web uses the information saved in these files to keep track of which files
it needs to update every time you modify your DWT.
The web editor's user interface calls the files in these hidden directories "metadata files". In fact, it even allows you to disable the generation of such files from its settings.
If Expression Web has lost track of which files are linked to a DWT, one of the following situations (or variations of them) may have happened.
You may have deleted or removed one or more files in those folders, or even both the folders. This may be because you thought they were temporary files left behind by Expression Web, and not cleared when you closed it. Or you may not even have done it directly; for example, you may have used some system or disk "cleaning" utility to make space on your hard disk, and it was overzealous in deleting files it thought was not needed.
You may have moved or copied the individual files in your local site folder to another location (such as to back it up), but failed to move or copy those hidden folders because, well, they were hidden, so you didn't even know they existed. Then when you used Expression Web with your backup copy (for example, because your originals had a mishap of some sort), it could not find its metadata files, resulting in the situation at hand.
You may have disabled the "metadata files" setting in Expression Web at one time because you thought it was not needed. In fact, if some of the files appear to be linked to the DWT but not the others, it is possible that you had a change of heart at some point and re-enabled the setting later. So the newly recreated configuration files contained some information (due to your having worked on those files after re-enabling the setting) but not others.
The files in the "_vti_cnf" and "_vti_pvt" folders have become corrupted,
perhaps because you have a hardware error on your system (eg, your hard disk or computer RAM is damaged
or is failing, leading to intermittent and random errors).
Or there could also be a bug somewhere in Expression Web that corrupted the configuration files. Note that I don't actually know of any such bug, but am listing it here as a possibility, since the general rule of thumb is that any software of sufficient complexity is bound to have bugs.
Whichever the case may be, this is a problem that you can fix from within Expression Web. That said, if the underlying cause is due to your hardware failing, or some program that automatically runs behind the scenes and "cleans" the disk, you may end up facing the same situation again in the future.
Before we force Expression Web to regenerate the "_vti_cnf" data, let's make sure that you
have not disabled its ability to create them.
Start up Expression Web and click "Site" on the menu bar. In the drop down menu that appears, click the "Site Settings..." line.
A dialog box with the title "Site Settings" will pop up. Make sure that the check box for "Maintain the site using hidden metadata files" has a tick in it. If not, click to put one there, then click the "OK" button.
Click "Tools" from the menu bar, followed by "Recalculate Hyperlinks..." from the drop down menu that appears.
The "Recalculate Hyperlinks" dialog box will be displayed. Click the "Yes" button in that window. Expression Web will then proceed to recreate the required files. The entire process may take some time, depending on the number of pages you have and how big each file is.
Once this is done, the problem should be fixed. Update your template in the usual way, and save it. Expression Web should now be able to display the correct number of files attached to the DWT and offer to update all of them.
Copyright © 2018-2020 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
Get more free tips and articles like this,
on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from https://www.thesitewizard.com/.
Do you find this article useful? You can learn of new articles and scripts that are published on thesitewizard.com by subscribing to the RSS feed. Simply point your RSS feed reader or a browser that supports RSS feeds at https://www.thesitewizard.com/thesitewizard.xml. You can read more about how to subscribe to RSS site feeds from my RSS FAQ.
This article is copyrighted. Please do not reproduce or distribute this article in whole or part, in any form.
It will appear on your page as:
What to Do if Expression Web Does Not Update Some of the Files Attached to a DWT (ie, Template)
