Children() not returning items in the right order

[enkelmedia]

Which Umbraco version are you using?

15.1.1

Bug summary

After inspirational information from @bergmania about the performance of the new Hybrid Cache I decided to spend some time migrating a site that have about 10k nodes. Impressive improvements, startup time -30-40% and memory footprint -50%.

The first thing i noticed was that the menu was not sorted in the same way as in the backoffice. We create the menu like this:

var items = startModel.Children().Where(x => x.IsVisible());

The order in which the nodes were returned is not the same as in the backoffice, but adding OrderBy(x=>x.SortOrder) solves the problem:

var items = startModel.Children().Where(x => x.IsVisible()).OrderBy(x=>x.SortOrder);

I did try to rebuild the database cache (Settings -> Published Status) and reload the memory cache.

Is this intended behavior or is something wrong? :)

Specifics

The site was upgraded from v13.5.1 and this worked fine.

Steps to reproduce

See above.

Expected result / actual result

No response

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This item has been added to our backlog AB#47319

[github-actions]

Hi there @enkelmedia!

Firstly, a big thank you for raising this issue. Every piece of feedback we receive helps us to make Umbraco better.

We really appreciate your patience while we wait for our team to have a look at this but we wanted to let you know that we see this and share with you the plan for what comes next.

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We wish we could work with everyone directly and assess your issue immediately but we're in the fortunate position of having lots of contributions to work with and only a few humans who are able to do it. We are making progress though and in the meantime, we will keep you in the loop and let you know when we have any questions.

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[Zeegaan]

Talking with @elit0451 about this, this seems like a bug, but it's weird, as we do call GetOrderedChildren here:

Umbraco-CMS/src/Umbraco.Core/Services/Navigation/ContentNavigationServiceBase.cs

Line 366 in a582732

childrenKeys = GetOrderedChildren(parentNode, structure, contentTypeKey).ToList();

Which returns by sortorder:

Umbraco-CMS/src/Umbraco.Core/Services/Navigation/ContentNavigationServiceBase.cs

Line 585 in a582732

.OrderBy(childKey => structure[childKey].SortOrder)

Are you able to reproduce this on a clean install ? 😁

[bielu]

@Zeegaan if you retrieve from db(or cache), order will change, so most likely you should order after converting IPublishedContent, not before :), there is no warranty on order when retrieving from storage.

[enkelmedia]

@Zeegaan I have not seen it before when playing with v15, this was my first upgrade. I don't have a clear reproduction case from a clean install at the moment.

[bielu]

@enkelmedia what storage for hybrid cache are you using? as if sql, there quite chance it does randomly order items :)

[enkelmedia]

Prying special here, just ”vanilla” config as in installing the Umbraco Template with dotnet new and point to the SQL server db

[JoseMarcenaro]

I got the same effect all over the place - unordered results from Children() - after upgrading a v13 SQL DB.
Then I published each parent item with descendants and it temporarilly fixed the issue... but it's still happening randomly.
Each time it happens, the solution is to republish (with descendants) the affected parent.
I am using v15.1.1 now, but the upgrade was done with v15.0.0

Will try to reproduce with a clean install using SQL server.

[bielu]

@JoseMarcenaro your description confirmed that what I expected that it is about order how it is stored in storage, fix should be pretty easy for it to switch when ordering happens

[JoseMarcenaro]

Hi @bielu thanks for your quick response.
But I do not understand what exactly to do in order to avoid this to keep happening (it does, from time to time)
Thx

[bielu]

@JoseMarcenaro umbraco will need fix it, as they order that when retrieving keys, but sql or others providers might not preserve order of keys when retrieving values, they might return values in order how they were index in storage. so Ordering should happen in method Children(), but that's more complicated as if they used cache structure to paginate they need do ordering in both places.