fix(edit-content): refresh History, Comments and Reference Pages after save #36617

[adrianjm-dotCMS]

Fixes #36617

Proposed Changes

The sidebar's History, Comments and Reference Pages stayed stale after a save/publish and needed a manual page reload. There were two independent root causes.

• The refresh effects lived on a component that gets destroyed. They sat on DotEditContentSidebarComponent, which the layout's @if destroys and recreates — taking the effects with it. Moved into store-level withHooks({ onInit }) in withActivities and withInformation, so they live as long as the store does. This matches the existing lock / workflow / history features.

• withHistory did not recognise a newly minted version. Its memo only invalidated on ${identifier}:${languageId}, but a save mints a new inode under the same identifier and locale, so loadVersions never re-fired. The symptom differed per host, which is why it looked like two separate bugs:

Screen.Recording.2026-08-05.at.3.47.52.PM.mov

	Full-screen	Dialog
Navigates on save?	Yes → runs initializeExistingContent	No
Effect on the list	Emptied (versions: [])	Left untouched
What you saw	"it went blank"	"it didn't update"

Added two invalidation signals: a cleared list (status === INIT, ignored mid-reload so it cannot fetch the identifier being left behind) and a live-inode baseline that only advances when not viewing a historical version, so browsing versions — and returning from them — does not refetch.

• Fixed signal granularity in both effects. They read store.uiState(), i.e. the whole slice. Every writer replaces that object wholesale, so the effects refetched on unrelated UI changes — including the view flip loadVersions performs internally, costing 3–4 redundant requests per save. Now they read the store.uiState.isSidebarOpen() leaf.

Checklist

• Tests
• Translations
• Security Implications Contemplated (none — no new endpoints, inputs or permissions; only client-side refresh timing)

Additional Info

Tests: 2180 passing across 111 suites in edit-content; lint and typecheck clean. New coverage includes publish-in-dialog, publish-while-comparing, the mid-reload case, historical/compare round trips, and a regression test for the signal-granularity fix (verified it fails against the previous code).

One existing test changed expectation — should not reload anything when only the version inode changes asserted that moving only the inode does not reload, which was literally the bug. Rewritten as should reload versions but not push publish history when the live inode moves. This is safe because browsing versions always goes through loadVersionContent, which sets isViewingHistoricalVersion; a bare inode move only happens on save/publish. The browsing cases are now covered by dedicated tests that set the realistic state.

Known follow-ups, deliberately out of scope:

• Push Publish History still does not reload on publish (kept the original per-identifier scoping).
• clearVersions() / resetVersions() / clearPushPublishHistory() / resetPushPublishHistory() in history.feature.ts have no production call sites — dead code worth removing separately.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[claude]

Claude finished @adrianjm-dotCMS's task in 2m 18s —— View job

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Code Review

Reviewed the diff against origin/main, focusing on the store-feature refactor (withHistory/withActivities/withInformation), the invalidation logic, and the two prior Copilot findings.

Resolved

• ✅ history-refresh.spec.ts:139-153 — The dialog-scenario content types are now tracked (dialogTargetTypeId, dialogParentTypeId) and deleted in a dedicated afterAll for the dialog host describe block, parent-first to respect the relationship reference. The prior finding (leaked content types after each run) is addressed, including the partial-setup case since each ID is assigned as soon as its create resolves.
• ✅ history.feature.ts:834-838 — The inode-based newLiveVersion invalidation is now gated on !isReloading. During an in-place reload, initializeExistingContent flips state to LOADING and clears isViewingHistoricalVersion in the same patch while keeping the outgoing (possibly historical) contentlet on screen; the !isReloading guard prevents that transient state from firing a fetch for the identifier being left behind, exactly as the prior finding requested. The incoming contentlet still triggers the correct load via identityChanged or the still-INIT versionsCleared once the reload completes.

Notes (non-blocking)

• The cleared-list / new-live-inode / signal-granularity logic in history.feature.ts:781-887 rests on a stated invariant: nothing writes INIT back to the version/push-publish statuses except the reducer defaults, initializeExistingContent, and clearVersions/clearPushPublishHistory, and the loaders only move LOADING → LOADED/ERROR. I verified this holds across the current diff and content.feature.ts:294-314. This is a genuine coupling that a future change to those loaders could silently break into a fetch loop — the in-code comment already flags it, which is the right mitigation.
• withInformation/withActivities effects correctly read the store.uiState.isSidebarOpen() leaf rather than the whole uiState() slice, avoiding the redundant refetches described in the PR body. isSidebarOpen defaults to true, so the reference-pages/activities fetch still fires on initial load — consistent with prior behavior.

No new bugs, security issues, or dotCMS-convention violations found in the diff. The two known follow-ups called out in the PR body (Push Publish History not reloading on publish; dead clear*/reset* methods) are reasonable to defer.
· adrianjm-dotCMS/history-comments-side-panel-not-refreshing-when

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• Read changed files
• Analyze history/activities/information feature changes
• Recheck the two prior Copilot review findings
• Post review

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Fixes stale sidebar History, Comments, and Reference Pages after saving content across routed and dialog editors.

Changes:

• Moves sidebar refresh effects into store features.
• Invalidates History when live inodes or lists change.
• Adds unit, integration, and E2E regression coverage.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 10 out of 10 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
information.feature.ts	Adds store-owned reference-page refresh.
information.feature.spec.ts	Tests information loading and refresh.
history.feature.ts	Expands History invalidation logic.
history.feature.spec.ts	Tests save, reload, compare, and historical flows.
content.feature.ts	Updates refresh ownership documentation.
activities.feature.ts	Adds store-owned activities refresh.
activities.feature.spec.ts	Tests automatic activities refresh.
dot-edit-content-sidebar.component.ts	Removes component-owned refresh effect.
dot-edit-content.layout.component.spec.ts	Adds host and component-lifecycle integration coverage.
history-refresh.spec.ts	Adds full-screen and dialog E2E coverage.