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Advanced publish setting: dependent items

This topic explains when and why you would want to modify the advanced publish setting Dependent items, found in the Additional settings tab of your Publish dialog.

The Additional settings tab contains the Dependent items setting, which can be set to the following two options:
  • Also publish or republish all items that link to items you are publishing (the default option)
  • Do not publish or republish any items that link to items you are publishing
Which items can be said to link to the item or items you selected to publish? They are any content items that, in some way, depend on your selected item(s). Here are some examples of such items:
  • A Component A that contains a Component link pointing to a Component B. If you publish Component B, Component A is dependent on it, as it quite literally links to Component B.
  • A Page that shows any part of a Component as a static Component. Because the Page contains parts of the Component, it's dependent on the item and therefore can be said to link to that Component.
  • A Page that contains an image from a Multimedia Component as a static Component, or shows a metadata field (let's say its alt text) of the Multimedia Component.

To see exactly which items will get published together with the item or items you selected, expand the Show items to publish area.

How do you decide whether to change this setting from its default?
Select the default option (or leave it selected)
Stick to the default if your selected item(s) have a small number of items that link to it, or if you are OK with sending out a big publish action. The reason this option is the default behavior is because it is guaranteed to preserve the consistency and integrity of your website: all content is up to date everywhere.
Select the alternative option
Switch to the alternative option only if you have a pressing reason to do so, that is, if you are concerned about performance issues when publishing, because the total number of items to publish is very large. Depending on what has been changed in your content, the result might be an inconsistent website, with old content in one place and updated content in another place. Let's look at the first two examples above again.
First the Component link example. imagine that you have changed Component B, but not in a way that affects Component A. For instance, let's say Component A shows the title of Component B as its link text, but you have not changed the title of Component B. In this case, republishing Component B does not require you to republish Component A as well, and you can save time by selecting this alternative option, without making your website inconsistent.
Now let's look at the Page example. Imagine that you have updated a Component, but want to save time by not republishing any Pages that contain your Component as a static Component, even though those Pages show Component fields that you have modified. Maybe most of your Pages reference your Component dynamically, and you can live with a temporary inconsistency. In this case, you'd select this option, but it would be wise to have a process in place for making your site consistent again in the future. For example, maybe your team agrees to schedule any highly impactful publish actions on weekends, when there's less traffic. This means that eventually, your site becomes consistent again.