So that latest update of Chrome has broken some of the Tridion GUI … one consequence of this has been that a number of users have been checking out Components and not quite realizing.

Whilst checking who had a some of the items check-out I realised that one of my colleagues was giving out the wrong person – in disbelief, astonishment and sheer anger I had them show me just how they were retrieving the information… and it turned out to be a perfectly easy mistak.

So, this colleague… he was using a method that I suspect a lot of people do and thus thought I’d write this wee observation. On checking the History of the Component you’re presented with a list of … well a list of stuff.

As you can see Item [2] would appear to be showing me just who has this bugger checked out… but does it?

On closer observation I see that the last two versions [1] are the same – meaning a minor version hasn’t been added (i.e. the person with this checked out has just checked it out … that’s it… checked out and gone home / on holiday / another place of employment - how rude).

Now note item [3] … this shows me the person that really has this checked-out. And you can see that the user ID x43 is not the same as Damian’s x77 as [2] lead us to rashly believe! It seems that the ‘user’ is actually ‘last user to save this item’ whilst the comment is the important one!

Is there an easier way…

You betchya… open the offending Component and look at the ‘Info’ tab. Here we can see the item is locked as it’s checked out and Tridion is telling us which user this is [1].

There’s no confusion here and I was probably in the Component anyway – additionally I can copy the username form here to enter directly into the email system…

Regards the user IDs … Tridion isn’t obfuscating the user for some crazy-ass security reason but this is the info it gets from the client systems – I can live with this and more importantly I can easily hunt down and get the person to check the item back in (or undo-checkout).