Thursday, 1 December 2016

Sitecore Bug - Archiving Specific Version of an Item

A colleague is trying to use the built-in Sitecore functionality to archive a specific version of the item. The way it is done is:

  1. Navigate to a content item and selected an old version of the item
  2. From the Review tab, in the ribbon, Schedule group, select the Archive Version Now menu item from the Archive dropdown.

Now the problem is that Sitecore will always select the latest version and pops up the dialog:


5 is the total number of versions I have but I want to archive version 2, which is the selected version. We have tested this in Sitecore 7.5 and 8.0 Update 3 (not tested on later versions) and they all behave the same.

The issue seems to be related to how the menu item is configured in the core database. So open Sitecore desktop and switch to core database and then in the Content Editor, navigate to the following item: 

/sitecore/content/Applications/Content Editor/Menues/Archive/Archive Version Now

Check the Message field:


The value contains the (id=$Target) parameter so it is always selecting the latest version of the item (that is clicked from content tree).

To fix the issue, just remove (id=$Target) from the field value, save.

Now go back to the master database, find the item and select version 2. Click on the Archive Version Now menu item (Review / Schedule / Archive dropdown) again and ta..la... it says:


Hit OK and the selected version is archived.

If you wish to restore the version, go to Sitecore desktop / All Applications / Archive and choose the desired item to restore.