Issues upgrading to Umbraco 7.2 (and how to resolve them)

Here are the stumbling blocks I found in my upgrade from Umbraco 7.1.2 to Umbraco 7.2.

1. Can’t get to verify upgrade page (spins forever)
2. DependencyHandler.axd not found (404)
3. Content nodes in list view don’t appear in search

How I upgraded

I have a Visual Studio 2013 project with the UmbracoCms package installed via nuget. I’ve done extensive customization of the web.config (mostly url rewriting but some other things too) but most other things are out of the box. So after checking in my existing code base, I felt pretty confident in following the general upgrade guides instructions to open the Package Console and type Update-Package UmbracoCms.

Now the general upgrade guide directs people upgrading to 7.2.0 to skip all of the information about how to respond to the overwrite prompts. So I chose not let nuget overwrite my files since that is the default action.

Unfortunately the guide also directs us to skip the section that talks about merging configuration files which is how I ran into my first problem.

Can’t get to the “verify upgrade” page (spins forever)

Solution: Merge your config files (mainly web.config)

Since I didn’t  have any language or ui.xml files to merge, I went straight to the finalize section of the guide and opened my site. I got to a page with the Umbraco logo and the gray background and then just sat there. Things were spinning but nothing was happening.

The way to make it stop is to go back and merge your config files. This may seem pretty obvious to you smart people out there but the guide did specifically say I should skip that section if upgrading to 7.2.0 (as of this writing).

DependencyHandler.axd not found (404)

Solution: Make sure you’re not rewriting it!

Now I was at the verify upgrade page. I clicked the button and read the facts. (do you think the two people with cats named Umbraco are the same two that have the Umbraco tattoo?). The installation finished and then it tried to redirect me to the backoffice… where it spun.

Luckily I’ve run into this problem before. I used Fiddler (a tool for watching http requests among other things) to see what was really happening. Sure enough /DependencyHandler.axd was returning a 404. I added that to my rule for excluding rewriting and things started working again. In case you’re wondering, here is what that rule looks like.

<!-- [ 1.] Filter out things that shouldn't be rewritten -->
<!-- Whitelist: Stop rewrite processing immediately for locations that don't need it -->
<rule name="StopRewriting" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^(css|scripts|umbraco|umbraco_client|install|media|webresource.axd|scriptresource.axd|dependencyhandler.axd)" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
<action type="None" />
</rule>

Content nodes in list view don’t appear in search

Solution: Rebuild and optimize your Internal Index

When I finally got into the mecca that is Umbraco 7.2 I was instantly disappointed that my most anticipated feature (the ability to link to/select things from list view) wasn’t working. No matter what list view item I searched for, it wouldn’t show results. Searching from directly within the list view worked as normal but those pages weren’t appearing in either the main backoffice search or the specific one that appears when you try to link to a list view page.

Luckily rebuilding and optimizing my index gets this working in a flash. I can only presume that either these nodes never showed up in main search before (and I never noticed) or there was some change to the way they are represented that requires the re-indexing.

Wrapup

Even with those three issues, this was still one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve encountered with Umbraco and nuget. I’ll continue testing the upgrade locally for a few days before deploying it to production.

Edited Note: When publishing an upgraded Umbraco to production (at least with this version) you need to update your web.config to reflect the original version number. This will allow the install (complete with any database changes) to run on the remote server. Just change your version number back to 7.2.0 when finished with the publish.