What are the steps to remove a Publication Target in Tridon?

Question

We are trying to unpublish pages, but they are erroring with "This item is in use.". As we looked into it, it is failing to unpublish from a developer's local computer that is no longer in use. We created that Publication Target & Target Type to his computer using the "Local file system".

We want to unpublish the content and also remove this target. How do I remove that Publication Target & Target Type?

Answer 1

You can point that target to an empty Deployer, and issue an unpublish instruction. Tridion will report success on that operation (meaning: did not fail), and then you'll be able to remove the target.

[EDIT: MORE CONTENT] The issue you have today is that your publication target uses a Destination that does not exist anymore. At the "far end" of that destination was a file system on a developer's machine, and a Content Delivery Deployer was running on the developer's machine, monitoring that location, and successfully deploying content.

Now you want to unpublish content from it but you can't, because it doesn't exist anymore (the destination). So you fool Tridion by changing your destination to point to one that does exist, and telling Tridion to unpublish it. Tridion's publishing relationship is always between Content (pages, components, etc) and Publication Targets - not the actual destination of a given publication target. So, by unpublishing from another destination/deployer that is linked to the Target, you are effectively telling Tridion that the content has been removed from that target - and can now be deleted.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

The alternative is to use the SetPublishedTo() methods of the old TOM to tell Tridion that the items are no longer published. (I don't think there's an equivalent in the new APIs - anyone know this?)

Another thing that might be useful is to try to use the stored procedures in the database to find which where the publication target is used. In other words, publication targets do have full "where-used" support; it's just not surfaced in the API. If you can figure out how to invoke the correct stored procedure, it might save you some hair pulling, and this is, of course, a read-only operation, so you won't damage the database.