Resetting Sitecore Staging Module

Greetings,
A quick troubleshooting post on Friday to wrap up the work week

This time about our favorite Staging module. This applies to all pre Sitecore 6.3 installations as the latest version does not require this module.

So I have recently witnessed a problem that our customer was facing. The module being stuck during file upload process, giving out a pretty generic error from the Staging log files:

11/2/2010 1:20:29 PM (ER): Could not Execute file upload: Index (zero based) must be greater than or equal to zero and less than the size of the argument list.

It turns out that sometimes the module may not output the most meaningful information to the logs, so the error may not be really helpful here.
For example, this could be caused by missing ACL permissions on the files that the module is synchronizing, etc. By the way, a useful thing to double check – make sure the application pool account has read/write/modify on the folder which are configured to be synchronized.

Here are some quick things you can do fairly to “reset” the module configuration:

1. Delete any files under upload, download and cache sub-folders within the working directory (/sitecore modules/staging/workdir). These are the temp files automatically generated, so it is safe to do this.
2. Clear the value of the “Last updated” field on the appropriate StagingServer item in your master db:

3. Run any type of publishing to trigger the Staging operation again.
4. Monitor Staging logs which are located within the working directory.

Also, check out this useful troubleshooting resource on Staging module troubleshooting.