FYI, it’s a Sitecore 8.2 Update 6 project and there are implementations for the relationship between some kind of content types such as resource, event, campaign, etc

An idea is to play around with the Links table by getting all the context item referrers and then filter the appropriate related items.

Certainly, there is no problem with the local machine as the Links database table is updated all the time.

(Note: by default, core database is in place, however, we wanted to use master database on development environment for consistency)

Working on my machine 😀

As a part of our working process, there is a Pull Request created for code review and integration test. At this point, the integration test is not passed as somehow we cannot rebuild the Links table of master database via Sitecore user interface on other machines (separate local Sitecore instance) so the output is not correct because the Links database table is outdated.

Of course, we have Unicorn in place to keep Sitecore items in synced between various source code branches, however, she does not care about Links database table so we all get Unrecognized Guid format error message on “Rebuild Link Databases” Sitecore dialog

At the beginning, we suppose that there are some broken links so let’s use the built-in Sitecore Admin tool Remove Broken Links in order to sort it out.

Open a browser, log into Sitecore by using admin account and then navigate to [YourSitecoreUrl]/sitecore/admin/RemoveBrokenLinks.aspx

No luck, the same error message is presented

How about Sitecore PowerShell Extensions and Broken Internal Links Report With Additional Info? Still get the same error message:

Our conclusion is that there are some corrupted values needed to be corrected manually => it should be a nightmare

Sitecore Powershell Extensions is a life-saver

Oh wait, personally I suppose that there is a good chance to print out any problematic item(s) by adjusting this script so I should make my hand dirty for that and here is the output

Wow very convenient way, just click on the problematic item id and then correct it on a friendly dialog 😀

Finally, let’s rebuild link database again 🙂

The output is now correct as the Links table is updated so let’s approve that Pull Request so it can be merged 😀

Some lessons-learned

Be careful with Remove Broken Links admin tool as it considers that Sitecore Query is not valid data source so it will remove them all if any

The value contains Sitecore token such as $name is not a valid data source as well so Remove Broken Links admin tool will remove them all too

Happy Sitecore Troubleshooting!