Akshay Sura

Sitecore Precision Scheduling with SiteCron 3.0.4 released in powerful ways!

Akshay Sura — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron 3.0.4 has been released.

SiteCron NuGet Link: https://www.nuget.org/packages/SiteCron

SiteCron GitHub Link: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron

SiteCron Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron.aspx?sc_lang=en

Credit where its due!

Credit for this release goes to Ben Golden.

What’s New?

Lets look at what was added. Please remember to Merge – Append when installing the package if you are upgrading.

1. Add SiteCron jobs via config files, that’t right a config file!

2. Switch between DB mode, config mode or a mixed mode to load your SiteCron jobs.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Precision Scheduling with SiteCron 3.0.2 released in powerful ways!

Akshay Sura — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron 3.0.2 has been released.

SiteCron NuGet Link: https://www.nuget.org/packages/SiteCron

SiteCron GitHub Link: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron

SiteCron Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron.aspx?sc_lang=en

Credit where its due!

Credit for this release goes to Ben Golden and Corey Smith. Mike Goldsuit Reynolds also chimed in with some help.

What’s New?

Lets look at what was added. Please remember to Merge – Append when installing the package if you are upgrading.

1. Added a check to add CRON Expression validation.

2. Added a check for Standard Values updates.

3. Added an IJob type that will let you run a SiteCron job as a Sitecore Job. You can now run a parameterless method from any of the loaded libraries.

4. Added an IJob type to help you run the Sitecore Command assigned to a Sitecore Scheduled Job item.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Precision Scheduling with SiteCron 3.0 released in powerful ways!

Akshay Sura — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron 3.0 has been released and I cannot believe there are 7,237 downloads. I never ever thought that it will be used by this many people.

SiteCron NuGet Link: https://www.nuget.org/packages/SiteCron

SiteCron GitHub Link: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron

SiteCron Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron.aspx?sc_lang=en

Credit where its due!

As you know I use SiteCron every day. Often the new features are based on the current needs of the project I am working on but lately it has been the developers who have been using the module. It was truly humbling to see my small module being used by huge organizations at a great scale. I never imagined that this would be the case.

This release was primarily fueled by the pull request by Ben Golden. Ben refactored majority of the codebase in an effort to add in Dependency Injection and also add the ability to have template inheritance for SiteCron jobs. This along with bug reports by Trisco & functionality requests I needed for my projects made the bulk of this release.

I always say that the Sitecore community is unique because of its Community. Like always I had Mike Goldsuit Reynolds & Kamruz RealKAM Jaman whom I was able to use as a sounding board and get advice.

What’s New?

Lets look at what was added. Please remember to Merge – Append when installing the package if you are upgrading.
1. New Icon for the SiteCron node 😉

2. Fixed ExecuteExactlyAtDateTime past bug
3. Code refactoring and introduced DI
4. Ability to run jobs which inherit from the SiteCronJob template (this is very helpful to customize)
5. Ability to provide Script log so that Execution Reports can be stored (more on this later)

6. New Log4net appender to store logs outside of the log.txt files

7. Configuration was modified to add a few more settings and also modified a couple

8.The SiteCron Execution Reports item bucket is set to Never Publish so that it does not slow down your publishing.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Precision Scheduling with SiteCron 2.1.8 released in powerful ways!

Akshay Sura — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron 2.1.8 has been released and I cannot believe there are 3,682 downloads.

SiteCron NuGet Link: https://www.nuget.org/packages/SiteCron

SiteCron GitHub Link: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron

SiteCron Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron.aspx?sc_lang=en

What’s New?

I use SiteCron every day and based on my project needs, I evolve it. Please remember to Merge – Append when installing the package if you are upgrading.

Modify Icon when the SiteCron scheduling item is disabled
Modify SiteCron scheduling item Display Name when the job is disabled
Ability to Execute Now! on any SiteCron job.
New Stats section to log, LastRun, NextRun, Execution Time and Last Run Log.
Schedule helping passing in the current scheduling SiteCron ItemID as zSiteCronItemID to all jobs
Configuration was modified to add a few more settings
HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL: Added the ability to extend the Save Item Handler inside of SiteCron. With this you could do several things, one which comes to mind is the ability to schedule item publishes based on Publish Restrictions.
Finally added both item only package and a full install Sitecore package with items and files to avoid code deployment. I requested an update on the marketplace but not sure how long the approval process will take.
Execute Exactly At a Specific Date Time was added. Using this field you can trigger a job at a specific date time. Why is it so different than a Cron Expression you ask, well Cron Expression based scheduling is typically recurring. You can execute a one time job but if I were to schedule publishing restrictions based item publishes, this field was necessary to facilitate that.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

TIHIDI: Sitecore Scheduling with SiteCron 2.1.8 in powerful ways!

Akshay Sura — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I have been using SiteCron for a while now and I get a steady stream of questions about the module. I thought its time I documented how I use SiteCron.

I do have some custom implementations of the IJob interface but I use PowerShell based jobs predominantly.

First go through some of my previous posts about SiteCron. Once SiteCron is installed and you are ready to rock, there is no better place to start than Sitecore PowerShell.

I get most of my work done via PowerShell scripts and this should not be any different.

SiteCron by default comes with a PowerShell Job which you can use.

Here are a few tips which help me:

Create a new SiteCron job and update the Type using the sample Execute PowerShell Script job.
Remember the Default PowerShell Job included out of the box only uses the first item in the Items field. This is to make sure that there is no recurrence, which means that you can only run one PowerShell script item at once. If you have a different need, utilize the code in the default PowerShell Job.
All of my jobs are automated and run at odd times. Make sure your Sitecore Instance running the jobs is up and running. I usually do this by running a Windows scheduler to call the instance url based on the needs.
Add the context db in your scripts.
<# Set DB Context as Master #>
Set-Location master:
Non-console based output might cause issues so use SilentlyContinue.
$ProgressPreference = ‘SilentlyContinue’
Run in admin context when you can.
$admin = [Sitecore.Security.Accounts.User]::FromName(“sitecore\admin”, $false)
[Sitecore.Security.Accounts.UserSwitcher]::Enter($admin)
Use the zSiteCronItemID which gets passed in by SiteCron and write the LastRunLog in the Scheduled Item Job.
- $script:logEntries = “”
- function WriteToLog($message)
  {
  Write-Log $message
  $script:logEntries += $(Get-Date –f o) + “ ” + $message + “`n”
  }
- finally {
  if($zSiteCronItemID) {
  $scheduleItem = Get-Item master: -ID $zSiteCronItemID
  if($scheduleItem)
  {
  $scheduleItem.Editing.BeginEdit()
  $scheduleItem[“LastRunLog”]=$script:logEntries
  $scheduleItem=$scheduleItem.Editing.EndEdit()
  }
  }

TIHIDI: Stands for This Is How I Do It. I am going to write a series of blog posts going through how I do Sitecore related work. Hope it helps you!

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore 9 Config Layers - Load Sequence

Akshay Sura — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Most of you are at the Sitecore Symposium 2017 in Vegas with me to witness the launch of Sitecore 9.

One feature which has been refined in this release is the loading of the Configuration files. We can find a ton of code and modules for this specific section to control what gets loaded first etc.

Not the official logo. Credit goes to Kamruz Jaman for creating it.

With Sitecore 9 the configuration loading is organized in the layers. With the introduction of layers, we have a new config file in App_Config called Layers.config. The following is an example:

Load Order

First Sitecore reads Web.Config, App_Config\ConnectionStrings.config and App_Config\Layers.config.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Layers.config by default contains 4 layers and they are loaded in the sequence as defined in the Layers.config file.

Sitecore configs
Module configs (modules such as SPE, Publishing service etc)
Custom configs (all your customizations to Sitecore)
and lastly Environment configs (Environment specific configs)

You can customize the config load order and create additional config layers to suite your development needs.

By default: With in each Layer, configuration files are loaded Alphabetically first from the base folder and then the sub-folders.

You can alter this behavior by specifying a specific folder load order as shown in the Sitecore layer in the above screenshot. You can also disable a layer by adding mode=”off” for that specific layer in the Layers.config file. This is a neat way to disable all custom configs to work on a bug.

As always, please please please use Patch configs to modify Sitecore functionality.

You can always check your configuration using the Showconfig.aspx file.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Experience Platform - Sitecore 9 released!

Akshay Sura — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Sitecore just released Sitecore 9 at the 2017 Sitecore Symposium here at the Mirage in Vegas.

Not the official logo. Credit goes to Kamruz Jaman for creating it.

Sitecore Experience Platform (Sitecore XP) consists on three major foundation pillars. Sitecore XP combines Experience Management (xManagement) with features of xConnect to get marketing and customer intelligence information stored in the Experience Database (xDB).

Experience Management (xManagement)

xManagement is the Content Management part of Sitecore which lets you create, manage, personalize and publish content. It comprises of three sections:

Data Definition: This is the part of Sitecore which we use to define the data using Templates. Templates contain fields and the template standard values can define the presentation of that specific template item.

Content: The content in Sitecore is based on templates. Either templates which you created or system templates. This content also includes media items in the Media Library.

Presentation: The presentation layer in Sitecore is where the items are combines with the presentation to render items on your website. Presentation is primarily built using ASP.NET MVC, although there are some who still use WebForms.

xDB

The Experience Database (xDB) provides data storage for all contact interactions across all data channels. This enables xDB to provide valuable information on marketing and analytical capabilities in Sitecore.

xConnect

xConnect provides services to get data from xDB. This information can be used on the Sitecore back-end or on your user facing website. xConnect enabled xDB to be decoupled from Sitecore.

Notable features in Sitecore 9

xConnect
The introduction of xConnect enables native omni-channel collection and segmentation at scale. This includes upgraded features for modeling your data, marketing automation, a unified view of the customer, as well as major architectural improvements including updating contacts from any channel at any time, automatic indexing of your data and built-in PII compliance support.

New Forms module
The Sitecore 9.0 release sees the introduction of a new Forms module, including:
– A completely redesigned UX with strong focus on business user
– A ’drag and drop’ form builder
– Form and field metrics showing the form and field performance
– Multi-page forms
– A Clean MVC (only) approach
– The ability to create form templates

Be sure to attend the Introduction to Sitecore Forms session by Pieter Brinkman and Hylke Heidstra on Webnesday October 18, 2017 at 3:15PM.

New Marketing Automation module
Marketing Automation provides a new way to create automated online campaigns in Sitecore. With a user friendly drag-and-drop interface, Marketing Automation provides an extendible set of tools.

Dynamic Placeholders
Sitecore MVC now supports Dynamic Placeholders allowing the use of the same placeholder key multiple times in the same rendering and across multiple renderings in the same placeholder

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Multi-Site custom 500 error page

Akshay Sura — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This post is an add on to my previous post Secure Sitecore : Why use a custom 500 error page? In this post I will go through how you can get a multi-site custom 500 error page in a Sitecore solution.

This would mean that each site in your Sitecore instance can have it’s individualized custom 500 error page. As I mentioned before, I truly believe it makes absolute sense to have a static 500 error page rather than on inside of Sitecore for obvious reasons.

A version of this code exists in production environments and has been working like a charm.

First, we need to add Global.asax because we need to process Application_Error event. Second, try not to use any Sitecore API in this file.

We added an AppSettings config flag to control the processing. In your web.config add the following to the AppSettings section:

You would also need to make a few changes in the Web.config. First add in the httpErrors node in :

Also set the customErrors mode as On.

Next we need to add the Application_Error event in the global.asax.cs file. Here is a sample below:


using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;

namespace YOURNAMESPACE
{
    public class Global : Sitecore.Web.Application
    {

        protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            var lastException = Server.GetLastError();

            bool show500page = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Show500PagePerSite"]) && ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Show500PagePerSite"].ToLower().Equals("true") ? true : false;

            if (show500page)
            {
                HttpContext.Current.Server.ClearError();
                HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();
                HttpContext.Current.Response.TrySkipIisCustomErrors = true;
                HttpContext.Current.Response.StatusCode = 500;
                HttpContext.Current.Response.StatusDescription = "500 Internal Server Error";
                Server.Transfer(GetSitePath(HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.GetComponents(UriComponents.Host, UriFormat.Unescaped))); // set the redirect location
            }
        }

        private string GetSitePath(string hostname)
        {
            if (hostname.Contains("FIRSTSITEHOST")) return "/errors/FIRSTSITEERRORPAGENAME.html";
            if (hostname.Contains("SECONDSITEHOST")) return "/errors/SECONDSITEERRORPAGENAME.html";

            return "/";
        }
    }
}

Hope this helps you out with your solution.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Scheduling with SiteCron 2.1.6

Akshay Sura — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron has been around for a while now and I have used it on production systems for the past two years. I use it for triggering Sitemap file generation, PowerShell scripts for data syncs with external API and maintenance tasks. Shout out to Mike Edwards for fixing the OnItemSaved handler.

SiteCron NuGet Link: https://www.nuget.org/packages/SiteCron

SiteCron GitHub Link: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron

SiteCron Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron.aspx?sc_lang=en

What’s New?

I use this module in every project I build. One of the things which bugged me the most was that it needed the Context DB to run in. For instance, on production CD’s we need it to run in the context of the Web or a custom db name like prod etc. Unfortunately, with the previous versions this was not possible.

Ability to auto Archive the item after it executes once. This will be useful for those one time jobs. More exciting things to come off of this.
Ability to run in a different context db than Master. This will allow you to use publish restrictions to run Jobs only on CM, CM & CD.

Installing SiteCron

To Install SiteCron, run the following command in your Visual Studio solution’s Package Manager Console.

Install-Package SiteCron

Once installed the NuGet package will add a few files to your solution.

Once the NuGet package is installed. Use the SiteCron Items Only Sitecore Package.zip file and install the package on your Sitecore instance via the Installation Wizard.

Once installed you can publish your code and you are good to go.

Using SiteCron

Now for the fun part. Using SiteCron truly depends on your needs. Out of the box, it can handle a Smart Publish and running a Sitecore PowerShell script. Apart from these two, you are free to implement your own code as long as you inherit from the IJob interface.

I personally use the PowerShell job to run custom PowerShell scripts for API Sync and Sitemap generation.

Let’s look at the Smart Publish job and see if we can figure out the mechanics of the Quartz jobs.

Smart Publish

Smart Publish job is a custom job I wrote to take care of smart publishing in Sitecore and be able to specify the target db. Here is how the Sitecore Item is setup:

Notice that the type filed has been set to a specific class in the SiteCron library. You could easily point this to your own library and write your custom Job. As long as you inherit from IJob interface and implement the Execute method you are golden. You can choose to use the Parameters AND/OR the Items field in your Job as needed. In this case I am only using the Parameters field.

Here is the code for this call:

Please review the comments to understand how we are leveraging Quartz to get our work done.

PowerShell

This by far is the most powerful Job in SiteCron. Sitecore PowerShell is a wonderful module and I do not know how I can get my work done without it. Adam Najmanowicz and Michael West have done such a wonderful job.

I use this Job to execute custom PowerShell scripts to run API syncs on the CM, Sitemap generation on the CD’s and nightly cleanup tasks.

I will go through this job code as well. First the Sitecore Item:

Notice that this job code exists in the SiteCron library as well. The code to this library is available in GitHub.

Essentially the Job is capable of running ONE Sitecore PowerShell script. Why ONE you ask? Well because there could be inter-dependencies among scripts, long running scripts and complications arising from it. I do however have commented code in the Powershell Execute Script Job which can tackle more than one PowerShell script at a time.

Please be sure that if you are scheduling PowerShell scripts, no client interaction commands exist in your script. Otherwise you will be hit by “Non interactive session cannot perform an interactive ‘WriteProgress’ operation”. I was able to clean up my PowerShell script and silence it by using the $ProgressPreference = ‘SilentlyContinue’.

Future versions of the Sitecore PowerShell module 4.7 and above might not need this.

Here is the code for this Job:

Custom Job

Now if you were to get started with a Custom Job. Here is what you need to do:

Install Quartz from NuGet
Create a new class lets call it HelloWorld.cs
Inherit from IJob interface
Implement Execute method
Place your code inside of the Job
Go to Sitecore admin and navigate to /sitecore/system/Modules/Sitecron
Insert a new Sitecron Job
Add in your library and class information for example: Sitecron.Jobs.PowerShell.ExecuteScript, Sitecron
Setup the Cron Expression – use the link on the field name or http://www.cronmaker.com/
Specify any Parameters or Items based on your Job needs

That is it!

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore 8.2+ Multi-site Shared Placeholders and Cascade Renderings

Akshay Sura — Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This post is based on setting up the home item (or another item) with the needed presentation and letting it cascade to all the pages under it in a multi-site Sitecore solution. At first, we tried using the cascade renderings which works great but at some point it becomes hard to manage with each rendering having the cascade flag.

What if, we setup the Home item with the presentation we need cascaded in a specific placeholders and the code takes care of the rest. Tim Braga at SUGCON Europe 2016 had a talk about Atomic Design which led to a conversation with Kam Figy (the fake Kam). I looked for code and my good friend Google got me to a blog post by Tom Dudfield.

Following which we came up with the requirements:

Setup one or more placeholders where we can set the presentation on the home item of a multi-site Sitecore solution.
Add or remove placeholders as we wish
Execute it in the context on specific databases (master, web, prod, etc)
Execute this on specific item templates
Exclude certain renderings from certain pages

Once we had the requirements we went to code. Having existing code helped a ton but making it generic and to be able to control as per the requirements needed some work.

Currently we use it for cascading the header and footer sections on our sites. A version of this code currently is running on our production systems and has not given us any issue.

Please be ware that modules such as Sitecore.Boost rely on the same processors as this code does. I would suggest coordinating with the module creators and wrapping their code as part of yours.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

TIHIDI: Deploy a Sitecore application via Octopus Deploy

Akshay Sura — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I have only been working with Octopus Deploy for a year but its one of my favorite tools. We depend on it for our end to end 100% automated deployments to all of our environments. The trick is to set it up properly in the first place. I was able to get some guidance from Kamruz Jaman when I got started and that helped me immensely to understand Octopus Deploy.

The deployment I am going to describe is how I set it up, it might not be right for all situations but hoping that it will provide some insight into how you would want to set it up for your own environment.

First, we use Slow Cheetah to do config transforms for local deploys on dev machines. This is important, because our main configs (not the transforms) will host Octopus variables, which is a huge part of this process.

TIHIDI: Stands for This Is How I Do It. I am going to write a series of blog posts going through how I do Sitecore related work. Hope it helps you!

Octopus Deploy is free for small teams and its an efficient and powerful deployment tool. Octopus has several process step templates ranging from a PowerShell step to a SQL backup step. For more information visit: https://octopus.com/

Setup

Here are the steps for the deployment server:

Create a local system admin account – call it OctoAdmin for example. This account will be used by the Octopus windows services to carry out your tasks.
Install Octopus Deploy on the deployment server.
Change the Logon user for the OctopusDeploy windows service to the local system admin account, which is OctoAdmin in our example.
Add any additional URL bindings you need to access Octopus Deploy in your environment.

Configuration

Configuration is where the Magic is for Octopus Deploy.

Environments

In the Environments section, setup your overall environment structure: Dev, QA, Stage, Prod, etc.

Lifecycles

Lifecycles are how you control the flow of releases between environments. If you wish to auto deploy to the first environment, like dev for instance and then promote it to the upper environments.

Variable Sets

This is where the gravy is. Set this up properly and you can do a ton of things. The idea is that the variable hold substitution values which you can replace at a machine level, environment level, role level, etc. You define your variables for debug mode, connection strings, etc. Anything which needs changing.

Once you defined your variables you simple substitute it in your configs using this syntax:

Octopus has a ton of documentation here: https://octopus.com/docs

Project

The project setup relies on all the setup we have done so far. Octopus gives you a ton of step templates which will let you deploy packages, run PowerShell, backup SQL Server db’s, etc. There are a ton of community templates which you can use as well. Below is a sample from one of our projects:

This combined with TIHIDI: Continuous Integration for a Sitecore solution – Engage! will get you going.

The key is to start small but have the right structure and you can build upon that.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

SiteCron 2.1.3 Released!

Akshay Sura — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron 2.1.3 has been released to GitHub & NuGet. I use this module on my projects quite a bit and I have been meaning to release an upgrade for the longest time.

Whats new?

Well, here is a short list:

Upgrade of Quartz.net
Included a Disabled Flag
Included an ArchiveOnExecution Flag
Upgrade references for Sitecore 8.2
Upgrade references for PowerShell 4.5
Fixed PowerShell execute code
Out of The Box (OOTB) plugins for Site Smart Publish and PowerShell execute

I will be posting some blog posts about the new features shortly.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

TIHIDI: Continuous Integration for a Sitecore solution - Engage!

Akshay Sura — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This blog post will go through how I setup my solution in a Continuous Integration environment. A true Continuous Integration and Delivery environment would need very little human intervention.

The Continuous Integration setup should trigger a build for each check-in and deployed to the Dev environment by default. Deployment to other environments should be on demand and controlled.

Previously I have used Team City and Jenkins to do automated builds. In this blog post we will only talk about the Build process using VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services).

Although I have only been using it for a year, I love VSTS. It has a lot of integrations and is very flexible.

TIHIDI: Stands for This Is How I Do It. I am going to write a series of blog posts going through how I do Sitecore related work. Hope it helps you!

A vent about source control: We have all used Team Foundation Server (TFS). It used to be a great tool back in the day but with the amount of collaboration of teams across time zones, Git is where its at. Git wont bite you.

Once you get used to using Git, its fairly simple. With tools like SourceTree, Git Extensions and more, its very convenient.

First, get to https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/ and get yourself an account if you do not already have one. Its free! You can host your Git repo to play with VSTS. There are a few restrictions but none that will block you for trying it out and even use it on your projects.

Once you have the account, create a project with a Git repo. Clone the repo and add your solution.

In your Sample solution, install the following on your .Web.csproj and .Serialization.csproj:

Install-Package OctoPack -Version 3.6.1

Once that is done, you would need to add a .nuspec file to define what gets packaged when OctoPack runs.

Here is the sample from my web project:

Here is he sample from my serialization project:

Notice in the serialization nuspec, we are specifying the exact files we need packaged up, where as in the web, we want it to capture the output.

Next, get to VSTS and create a build project for a Visual Studio Project. Here are the trigger settings so an automated build triggers on check-in. Be sure to check the “Batch changes while a build is in progress”.

Here are the steps in my definition:

Add a Get sources task and specify the repo and the branch. In this case I am pulling from the dev branch.

Add a NuGet restore step to restore the NuGet packages for your solution. Previously the NuGet restore was part of the Build Solution step but that is now deprecated.

Also I do some name attribute manipulation in the Nuspec file on the build server based on the environment we run on to generate NuGet packages with different names. This step has some PowerShell to replace content in the Nuspec files.

Add a Build Solution step to compile your solution and run OctoPack to push your generated NuGet packages to your Octopus server.

That is it. Our builds are done in less than 1 minute. The majority of time goes into uploading the NuGet packages to the Octopus server.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

It’s going to be a rainbow and unicorns kind of day - Ride the Sitecore Unicorn on a rainbow!

Akshay Sura — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Alright let’s address the elephant in the room! Kam Figy is not the creator of Unicorn, Kamruz Jaman is. This post is not mean to sing praises of Unicon or the Kams as we callz it. It is mainly to show how we use Unicorn to build our end to end deployment from a dev machine to the production CD’s using Unicorn for serialization.

If I have not said so before, I love VSTS and Octopus Deploy. I am not a master of either but I got a great deal of experience in the past year setting them up. I will follow up this blog post with Octopus posts but this one is reserved for Unicorn.

Unicorn != TDS && TDS != Unicorn. This has been said multiple times. Each has a few features which are common but they have their own set of features. TDS being that its a paid product has a lot of great features especially to do with deployment, builds etc.

So lets start. First you install Unicorn from NuGet:

Install-Package Unicorn -Version 3.3.2

This installs a set of configs and adds appropriate references to your project. If you plan on serializing roles, you would also need Unicorn.Roles:

Install-Package Unicorn.Roles -Version 3.3.2

By default, Unicorn provides sample configurations. Here are some I use:



  
    
    
      #{sitecore.sourcefolder}




	
		
			
				YOURSECREDKEYPLEASEUSEALONGONEANDBEMEEEFRIEND
				
				true

I make sure that the config transforms locally point to the local serialization folder outside of the wwwroot on my dev box. This helps a lot in structuring your configs on all the environments. Using Octopus, we set the path for the serialization folder dynamically.

For your deployment:

Package code and serialization separately in to different Nuget Packages. I use Nuspec files with Octopus Deploy.
Once code is deployed, make sure you remove the Unicorn.DataProvider.config file from the destination CD/CM so that Unicorn does not serialize on those servers.
Make sure the serialization folder on the destination system is wiped before your add it via Octopus or any other deployment tool.
Deploy the serialization Nuget package.
Use PowerShell to sync Unicorn serialized files automatically as part of your deployment process on the CM instances.
On CD’s remove the Rainbow.config and Project.Unicron.Serialization.config files.

Here is a sample of the Octopus step of sync Unicorn via PowerShell:


$apppath = $OctopusParameters["sitecore.powershellfolder"]
$siteHostName = $OctopusParameters["website.url"]
$siteUrl = "$siteHostName/unicorn.aspx"

Import-Module $apppath\Unicorn.psm1
Sync-Unicorn -ControlPanelUrl $siteUrl -SharedSecret 'YOURSECREDKEYPLEASEUSEALONGONEANDBEMEEEFRIEND'

Since we deployed this 5 months ago, we have not touched it. We run through a few hundred deploys per week.

From dev to prod, we do not do any manual steps, everything is handled by Octopus and so far we have not yet gotten any Unicorn issues. If you do end up with an odd situation, Kam is reachable on the Sitecore Slack and he is very responsive.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Sitecore Multi-site Multi-CDN implementation

Akshay Sura — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Recently we have been going through a series of SEO tweaks based on recommendations from our SEO Expert. Several of them are very interesting to look into and the reasoning and how search engines rank sites based on that is amazing.

One of those happens to be how we use a CDN. CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN helps deliver anything from web page assets to the page itself to the end users browser. In our case we use a CDN for our website assets like CSS, java-script and media library items.

Traditionally we set the following configuration in Sitecore:

     
    
      
        public
      
      
        false
      
      
        https://SOMENAME.azureedge.net/

This works fine as the server url is added to all the media library links. Now, if we have multiple sites, we would want to control the CDN accordingly. Also based on the SEO guidelines its better to do cdn.SiteA.com or anysubdomain.SiteA.com for the CDN name.

So now we need to use cdn.SiteA.com and cdn.SiteB.com on the same instance of Sitecore where we have only one setting which is Media.MediaLinkServerUrl. To get around this we turn to the MediaProvider. We would need to override the GetMediaUrl function to append the appropriate CDN host based on the website.

There are a few CDN modules on the Sitecore marketplace but we wanted something simple. We want it to just modify the Media Library links and append the url of the CDN per site. To do this, we add an additional attribute to the site node of your website to store the CDN hostname.

Once that is done you would need to create the following class called CDNMediaProvider inheriting from the MediaProvider class.

  
using Sitecore.Data.Items;
using Sitecore.Resources.Media;
using System;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using Sitecore.DependencyInjection;
using Sitecore;
using Sitecore.Sites;
using Sitecore.Text;
using Sitecore.Web;
using YOURSOLUTION.Business.Caching;
using YOURSOLUTION.SCExtensions.Settings;

namespace YOURSOLUTIONNAMESPACE.Business.SC.Providers
{
    public class CDNMediaProvider : MediaProvider
    {
        string CDNHostnamePropertyKey = "";

        public override string GetMediaUrl(MediaItem item, MediaUrlOptions options)
        {
            string baseMediaUrl = base.GetMediaUrl(item, options);
            IGeneralSettings settings = GeneralSettings.Current;
            CDNHostnamePropertyKey = settings.CDNHostnameKey;

            if (HasCDN(Sitecore.Context.Site))
            {
                string cacheKey = string.Concat(Sitecore.Context.Site.Name, baseMediaUrl);

                var cache = ServiceLocator.ServiceProvider.GetService();
                if (cache != null)
                {
                    baseMediaUrl = cache.GetOrCreateItem(cacheKey, () => GetMediaUrl(item, baseMediaUrl),
                        new TimeSpan(6, 0, 0));
                }
            }
            return baseMediaUrl;
        }

        private string GetMediaUrl(MediaItem item, string baseMediaUrl)
        {
            UrlString url = new UrlString(baseMediaUrl);

            if (baseMediaUrl.Contains(Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.Media.MediaLinkPrefix))
            {
                var version = item.InnerItem.Version.Number.ToString();
                var updated = DateUtil.ToIsoDate(item.InnerItem.Statistics.Updated);

                url.HostName = Sitecore.Context.Site.Properties[CDNHostnamePropertyKey];
                url.Protocol = WebUtil.GetScheme();
                url.Add("v", version);
                url.Add("d", updated);
                baseMediaUrl = url.ToString();
            }
            return LinkHelper.RemoveSslPort(baseMediaUrl);
        }

        private bool HasCDN(SiteContext siteContext)
        {
            return !string.IsNullOrEmpty(siteContext.Properties[CDNHostnamePropertyKey]);
        }
    }
}

The code above can serve requests as they come and cache them for a speedy retrieval. As you can see I am adding in the version and the updated date so that published changes will get reflected. To get this code executing we need to register our CDNMediaProvider class using the following patch config.

     

  
    
      
        YOURSOLUTIONNAMESPACE.Business.SC.Providers.CDNMediaProvider, YOURSOLUTIONNAMESPACE.Business

That is it. Once the code is published with the right settings, you will see your media urls come up with the cdn host appended.
https://cdn.firstsitedomain.com/-/media/hero/blackboard.png?v=1&d=20170322T200703Z

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Don't speak I know just what you're saying - Sitecore SPEAK - Customize General Link with NoFollow Checkbox

Akshay Sura — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I recently had to customize a General Link SPEAK dialog to add a NoFollow checkbox so that we can add a rel=”nofollow” on certain links on the site. At first, I was scared of SPEAK and I did not SPEAK yet! 😉

I will say that SPEAK could be easier thank it is and it would help if it didn’t change for every release. Saying that, my hope is that SPEAK will either evolve or Sitecore will end up changing it entirely. I implemented it in Sitecore 8.2 Update 2 rev.161221.

I started searching on this topic and I did not get many hits on customizing an existing field like General Link. The ones I found useful are listed at the bottom of this post. It was made difficult by the changes to Sitecore in each release. Finally I was able to get a working solution. So here goes.

First and foremost, install Sitecore Rocks Visual Studio Plugin, it will make your life easy.

Connect Sitecore Rocks to your local Sitecore Site. Make sure you test the connection so that Sitecore Rocks can update the server components for its interaction.

Once connected, traverse through the tree to /sitecore/client/Applications/Dialogs/InsertLinkViaTreeDialog.

Open the Design Layout for that Dialog.

Once open you can see the different renderings which make up the Dialog.

WORD OF CAUTION: I hosed my install when I added SPEAK 2 renderings in this dialog. The Dialog displayed and acted differently. So the best way to make sure it will work is to duplicate the renderings currently in the Dialog and set the properties.

Open the properties of the PageCode rendering and note the location for the PageCodeScriptFileName attribute and the value for the PageCodeTypeName. Later on we will be modifying these to get our functionality working.

Next, lets duplicate one of the existing items like Anchor. Each of the fields usually comes with three renderings, one for Row, one for label and field. Lets call them, NoFollowRow, NoFollowTextLbl and NoFollowText.

Since we want a checkbox, we will add a new SPEAK version 1 checkbox by clicking on the Add rendering button up top. Lets call it NoFollowChk.

On NoFollowRow properties lets make sure the PlaceholderKey is set to NameContainer.Content and for the other three renderings, lets set the PlaceholderKey to NoFollowRow.Content.

Now please don’t be that fruit who complains about too much detail. I figured that there are a few steps which seem simple enough but difficult to find/perform if you are not a SPEAK expert.

Here are the property values for each of the renderings.

For Text’s you can either specify on the rendering or provide a datasource to where the text is stored.

Leave the text field for Checkbox empty as we want to use the pretty label in NoFollowTextLbl.

We are going to set the text box to be invisible. We will use it for storage of the checked value.

Now that we have everything setup on the dialog, save the InsertLinkViaTreeDialog.layout item.

Ok now for the dirty part. We need to replace Sitecore.Speak.Applications.InsertLinkDialogTree, Sitecore.Speak.Applications with our custom implementation. Unfortunately we have to go down this route ad the code in Sitecore.Speak.Applications.InsertLinkDialogTree, Sitecore.Speak.Applications cannot be extended or overwritten. Lets get to it.

Use your favorite decompiler to get the output for Sitecore.Speak.Applications.InsertLinkDialogTree, Sitecore.Speak.Applications and create a new class InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom. Here is the complete class from ReSharper (Modified lines are highlighted):

using Sitecore;
using Sitecore.Configuration;
using Sitecore.Data.Items;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Shell;
using Sitecore.Speak.Applications;
using Sitecore.Web;
using Sitecore.Web.PageCodes;
using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace CustomSpeak
{
    public class InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom : PageCodeBase
    {
        private string targetActiveBrowserItemId = "{C5FA4571-37B3-472C-BDA1-0FADC2D2EFA7}";
        private string targetNewBrowserItemId = "{02A6C72E-17BB-48C5-8D35-AF9C494ED6BA}";
        private string targetCustomItemId = "{07CF2A84-9C22-4E85-8F3F-C301AADF5218}";

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering TreeView { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering ListViewToggleButton { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering TreeViewToggleButton { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering InsertEmailButton { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering InsertAnchorButton { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering TextDescription { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering AnchorText { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering Target { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering AltText { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering QueryString { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering StyleClass { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering CustomUrl { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering TargetLoadedValue { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering NoFollowChk { get; set; }

        public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering NoFollowText { get; set; }

        public string TargetActiveBrowserItemId
        {
            get
            {
                return this.targetActiveBrowserItemId;
            }
            set
            {
                Assert.ArgumentNotNull((object)value, "value");
                this.targetActiveBrowserItemId = value;
            }
        }

        public string TargetNewBrowserItemId
        {
            get
            {
                return this.targetNewBrowserItemId;
            }
            set
            {
                Assert.ArgumentNotNull((object)value, "value");
                this.targetNewBrowserItemId = value;
            }
        }

        public string TargetCustomItemId
        {
            get
            {
                return this.targetCustomItemId;
            }
            set
            {
                Assert.ArgumentNotNull((object)value, "value");
                this.targetCustomItemId = value;
            }
        }

        public override void Initialize()
        {
            string setting = Settings.GetSetting("BucketConfiguration.ItemBucketsEnabled");
            this.ListViewToggleButton.Parameters["IsVisible"] = setting;
            this.TreeViewToggleButton.Parameters["IsVisible"] = setting;
            this.TreeView.Parameters["ShowHiddenItems"] = UserOptions.View.ShowHiddenItems.ToString();
            this.TreeView.Parameters["ContentLanguage"] = WebUtil.GetQueryString("la");
            this.ReadQueryParamsAndUpdatePlaceholders();
        }

        private static string GetXmlAttributeValue(XElement element, string attrName)
        {
            if (element.Attribute((XName)attrName) == null)
                return string.Empty;
            return element.Attribute((XName)attrName).Value;
        }

        private void ReadQueryParamsAndUpdatePlaceholders()
        {
            string queryString1 = WebUtil.GetQueryString("ro");
            string queryString2 = WebUtil.GetQueryString("hdl");
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryString1) && queryString1 != "{0}")
                this.TreeView.Parameters["RootItem"] = queryString1;
            this.InsertAnchorButton.Parameters["Click"] = string.Format(this.InsertAnchorButton.Parameters["Click"], (object)WebUtility.UrlEncode(queryString1), (object)WebUtility.UrlEncode(queryString2));
            this.InsertEmailButton.Parameters["Click"] = string.Format(this.InsertEmailButton.Parameters["Click"], (object)WebUtility.UrlEncode(queryString1), (object)WebUtility.UrlEncode(queryString2));
            this.ListViewToggleButton.Parameters["Click"] = string.Format(this.ListViewToggleButton.Parameters["Click"], (object)WebUtility.UrlEncode(queryString1), (object)WebUtility.UrlEncode(queryString2));
            int num = queryString2 != string.Empty ? 1 : 0;
            string empty = string.Empty;
            if (num != 0)
                empty = UrlHandle.Get()["va"];
            if (!(empty != string.Empty))
                return;
            XElement xelement = XElement.Parse(empty);
            if (!(InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "linktype") == "internal"))
                return;
            string xmlAttributeValue = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "id");
            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(xmlAttributeValue))
                return;
            Item obj = (string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryString1) ? (Item)null : ClientHost.Databases.ContentDatabase.GetItem(queryString1)) ?? ClientHost.Databases.ContentDatabase.GetRootItem();
            Item itemFromQueryString = SelectMediaDialog.GetMediaItemFromQueryString(xmlAttributeValue);
            if (obj != null && itemFromQueryString != null && itemFromQueryString.Paths.LongID.StartsWith(obj.Paths.LongID))
                this.TreeView.Parameters["PreLoadPath"] = obj.ID.ToString() + itemFromQueryString.Paths.LongID.Substring(obj.Paths.LongID.Length);
            this.TextDescription.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "text");
            this.AltText.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "title");
            this.StyleClass.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "class");
            this.QueryString.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "querystring");
            this.AnchorText.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "anchor");
            this.NoFollowChk.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "nofollowchk");

            this.NoFollowText.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "nofollowtext");

            this.SetupTargetDropbox(xelement);
        }

        private void SetupTargetDropbox(XElement fieldContent)
        {
            string xmlAttributeValue = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(fieldContent, "target");
            string str;
            if (xmlAttributeValue.Equals("_blank", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
                str = this.TargetNewBrowserItemId;
            else if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(xmlAttributeValue))
            {
                str = this.TargetActiveBrowserItemId;
            }
            else
            {
                str = this.TargetCustomItemId;
                this.CustomUrl.Parameters["Text"] = xmlAttributeValue;
            }
            this.TargetLoadedValue.Parameters["Text"] = str;
        }
    }
}

Add the two properties we need.

public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering NoFollowChk { get; set; }
public Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.Rendering NoFollowText { get; set; }

In the ReadQueryParamsAndUpdatePlaceholders function add the following to send back information stored to the SPEAK component.

this.NoFollowChk.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "nofollowchk");
this.NoFollowText.Parameters["Text"] = InsertLinkDialogTreeCustom.GetXmlAttributeValue(xelement, "nofollowtext");

The next part is to modify how the fields interact. Open Website\sitecore\shell\client\Applications\Dialogs\InsertLinkViaTreeDialog.js file.

Modify the initialized function to check for the text value in the text field and set the checkbox based on that. Here is the entire file with modifications.

define(["sitecore"], function(Sitecore) {
  var InsertLinkViaTreeDialog = Sitecore.Definitions.App.extend({
    initialized: function () {

      this.updateCustomUrl();

      if (this.NoFollowText.get("text") == "true")
      {
	      this.NoFollowChk.set("isChecked", true);
      }
	  
      this.Target.on("change", function () {
        this.updateCustomUrl();
      }, this);

      // work around an issue in combobox
      this.TargetsDataSource.on("change:items", function () {
        if (this.__firstTime) {
          this.__firstTime = false;
          this.Target.set("selectedValue", this.TargetLoadedValue.get("text"));
        }
      }, this);
    },
      
    updateCustomUrl: function () {

      var emptyOptionID = "{A3C9DB39-1D1B-4AA1-8C68-7B9674D055EE}";
      var customUrlOptionID = "{07CF2A84-9C22-4E85-8F3F-C301AADF5218}";

      var targetWindowValue = this.Target.get("selectedItem");

      if (!targetWindowValue || targetWindowValue.itemId === emptyOptionID) {
        this.CustomUrl.set("isEnabled", false);
        return;
      }

      if (targetWindowValue.itemId === customUrlOptionID) {
        this.CustomUrl.set("isEnabled", true);
      } else {
        this.CustomUrl.set("isEnabled", false);
      }
    },

    insertInternalLinkResult: function () {
      var targetDisplayTextID = this.TextDescription,
      targetPathID = this.TreeView,
      targetPathProperty = "$path",
      targetQueryID = this.QueryString,
      targetAltTextID = this.AltText,
      targetStyleID = this.StyleClass,
      targetWindowID = this.Target,
      customUrlID = this.CustomUrl,
      targetControlID = this.TreeView,
      anchor = this.AnchorText,
      nofollowtext = this.NoFollowText,

      nofollowchk = this.NoFollowChk,
      selectedItemsPropertyName = "selectedNode",
      template = ' querystring="<%=queryString%>" id="<%=itemId%>" nofollowtext="<%=nofollowtext%>" nofollowchk="<%=nofollowchk%>" />',
      targetWindowValue,
      path,
      emptyOptionID = "{A3C9DB39-1D1B-4AA1-8C68-7B9674D055EE}",
      htmlEncode = function (str) {
        return str.toString().replace(/&/g, '&').replace(//g, '>').replace(/"/g, '"');
      };

      if (!targetDisplayTextID) {
        console.log("Provide at least display text for your link");
        return false;
      }

      targetWindowValue = targetWindowID.get("selectedItem");

      if (!targetWindowValue || targetWindowValue.itemId === emptyOptionID) {
        targetWindowValue = "";
      } else {
        var targetWindow = targetWindowValue.$displayName.trim();

        switch (targetWindow) {
          case 'Active Browser':
            targetWindow = "";
            break;
          case 'New Browser':
            targetWindow = "_blank";
            break;
          case "Custom":
            targetWindow = customUrlID.get("text");
            break;
          default:
            targetWindow = "";
        }

        targetWindowValue = "target=\"" + targetWindow + "\"";
      }

      if (targetPathID.get(selectedItemsPropertyName) &&
        "rawItem" in targetPathID.get(selectedItemsPropertyName) &&
        targetPathID.get(selectedItemsPropertyName).rawItem[targetPathProperty]) {
        path = targetPathID.get(selectedItemsPropertyName).rawItem[targetPathProperty];
      }

      var itemLink = _.template(template, {
        displayText: htmlEncode(targetDisplayTextID.get("text")),
        alternateText: htmlEncode(targetAltTextID.get("text")),
        itemId: targetControlID.get("selectedItemId"),
        queryString: htmlEncode(targetQueryID.get("text")),
        target: targetWindowValue,
        styleClass: htmlEncode(targetStyleID.get("text")),
        path: path,
        
        nofollowtext: nofollowchk.get("isChecked"),

        nofollowchk: htmlEncode(nofollowchk.get("text")),
        anchor: htmlEncode(anchor.get("text"))
      });

      return this.closeDialog(itemLink);
    },
        
    __firstTime: true

  });

  return InsertLinkViaTreeDialog;
});

In the insertInternalLinkResult function, add in the mapping from the Class to the variables UI will write as raw value of the General Link field. Also modify the template variable to add in the markup used to generate the output to be stored in the General Link field. Last but not the least is to store the correct Checkbox value in the text field. Boom, this concludes the customization. Now to check out the output.


if (this.NoFollowText.get("text") == "true")
{
      this.NoFollowChk.set("isChecked", true);
}


nofollowtext = this.NoFollowText,
nofollowchk = this.NoFollowChk,
selectedItemsPropertyName = "selectedNode",
template = ' querystring="<%=queryString%>" id="<%=itemId%>" nofollowtext="<%=nofollowtext%>" nofollowchk="<%=nofollowchk%>" />',


nofollowtext: nofollowchk.get("isChecked"),
nofollowchk: htmlEncode(nofollowchk.get("text")),

This only solves half the problem which is how do we get Sitecore backend to show and process the Checkbox for NoFollow. In the next blog post we will look at how to render it using GlassMapper. Here is a video of the functionality.

via GIPHY

References:
General Link Dialog InsertLinkViaTreeDialog misses InsertLinkRules after Upgrade to 8.2u2
Extending internal General Link dialog with Checkbox in SPEAK
Extending Sitecore 8.1 – Adding support for anchors in internal links

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Habi what-a-tat ? Create a Sitecore Helix solution from scratch using PowerShell

Akshay Sura — Sat, 21 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This post is all about creating a Helix based solution from scratch. Please watch the video for additional information and a demo of the script. I really discourage people from using Habitat as the base to create new solutions. Hopefully this script will help.

Also refer to Marc Duiker’s Hands-on with Sitecore Helix: Anatomy of the Add-HelixModule.ps1 PowerShell script.

So in order to create a Helix solution from scratch, we do not have any tool at this moment. We either manually build it or use Habitat as a base. I do not recommend using Habitat and modifying that solution to fit your needs.

To start of with, the best way to automate this is to use PowerShell scripts inside of the Visual Studio IDE via the Package Manager Console. We need to use DTE (EnvDTE).

Download the HabitatSolutionScript.ps1 from https://gist.github.com/akshaysura/184132f67decb749ae235b602351832c

Open Visual Studio IDE

Open Package Manager Console

Type in $profile

Open that location in Windows explorer. You might not have NuGet_profile.ps1 at that location. Create one.

Open the NuGet_profile.ps1 and insert the following line and modify the path to your HabitatSolutionScript.ps1

. “D:\Projects\PowerShell\HabitatSolutionScript.ps1”

Save and close NuGet_profile.ps1

Restart your Visual Studio IDE and open Package Manager Console

Type in let and tab or you could type in the whole command Lets-Rumble

Follow the on screen prompts and enjoy your solution. I would recommend watching the video for additional information.

The script is not tested so please use it at your own risk. Since it required an empty folder, it won’t affect your existing code/solutions.

Please contribute to this script and hopefully we can make it better for the entire community.

#paths to the project templates on your system
$global:classTemplate = "D:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplatesCache\CSharp\Windows Root\Windows\1033\ClassLibrary\csClassLibrary.vstemplate"
$global:webTemplate = "D:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplatesCache\CSharp\Web\1033\WebApplicationProject40\EmptyWebApplicationProject40.vstemplate"

#variable used to store the path for the empty Habitat folder
$global:helixPath =""

#empty variable used to store the solution name
$global:solutionName = ""

#empty variable used to store the project names like Habitat to which we will add .Website
$global:projectNames = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList

#empty variable used to store the feature name prefix like Sitecore.Foundation to which we will add foundation projects
$global:foundationNamePrefix = ""

#list of foundation projects to create
$global:foundationNames = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList


#empty variable used to store the feature name prefix like Sitecore.Feature to which we will add feature projects
$global:featureNamePrefix = ""

#list of features to create
$global:featureNames = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList


#Setup the folders to create
$global:folderPaths = @("\etc","\lib","\scripts","\specs","\src\Feature","\src\Foundation","\src\Project","\src\Project\Common\code","\src\Project","\src\Project\Common\code","\src\Project\Common\serialization")

$global:projectPath = "\src\Project\"
$global:foundationPath = "\src\Foundation\"
$global:featurePath = "\src\Feature\"
$global:srcFolder = "\src"
$global:codeFolder = "\code"
$global:rolesFolder = "\roles"
$global:serializationFolder = "\serialization"
$global:testsFolder = "\Tests"


$global:testProjectName = "Tests"
$global:websiteName = "Website"

$global:ConfigFolderName = "Configuration"
$global:FeatureFolderName = "Feature"
$global:FoundationFolderName = "Foundation"
$global:ProjectFolderName = "Project"


$global:solution = $null

<# Prompt to confirm solution creation. #>
function Confirm-Creation
{
     param (
           [string]$Title = 'Create Helix Solution?'
     )

     Write-Host "================ $Title ================"
     
     Write-Host "1: Continue"
     Write-Host "q: Press 'q' to Quit"
}

<# Prompt to accept Projects #>
function Accept-Projects
{
     param (
           [string]$Title = 'Enter Project Names/Tenants/Sites - Site1 etc'
     )

cls
     Write-Host "================ $Title ================"
     
     Write-Host "1: Create a Project."
     Write-Host "q: Press 'q' to exit this prompt and continue to create Foundation projects."
}

<# Prompt to accept Foundation projects #>
function Accept-FoundationProjects
{
     param (
           [string]$Title = 'Enter Foundation Project Name(s)'
     )

cls     
     Write-Host "================ $Title ================"
     
     Write-Host "1: Create a Foundation Project."
     Write-Host "q: Press 'q' to exit this prompt and continue to create Feature projects."
}

<# Prompt to accept Feature projects #>
function Accept-FeatureProjects
{
     param (
           [string]$Title = 'Enter Feature Project Name(s)'
     )
     cls
     Write-Host "================ $Title ================"
     
     Write-Host "1: Create a Feature Project."
     Write-Host "q: Press 'q' to exit this prompt and continue."
}

<# Purpose is get the information for the folder in which we are going to create the folder structure #>
function Get-HabitatFoundationFolder
{
    #Get path and validate the path
    $global:helixPath = $input = Read-Host "Please specify the path to an empty folder"

    if($global:helixPath -eq "")
    {
        Write-Host "Select a valid folder path."
        exit
    }

    if ( -not (Test-Path $global:helixPath -PathType Container) ) 
    { 
        Write-Host "Select a valid folder."
        exit
    }

    $directoryInfo = Get-ChildItem $global:helixPath | Measure-Object
    if ($directoryInfo.count -gt 0)
    {
        Write-Host "Folder is not empty."
        exit
    }
}

<# Purpose is to create the base folder structure of the Habitat solution. Step 1. #>
function Create-HabitatFoundationFolders
{

    foreach ($path in $global:folderPaths)
    {
        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $path
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    
    }

    $solution = Get-Interface $dte.Solution ([EnvDTE80.Solution2])
    $parentProject = $solution.AddSolutionFolder($global:FoundationFolderName)
    $parentSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $parentProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])

    foreach ($foundation in $global:foundationNames)
    {
    
        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:foundationPath + $foundation + $global:codeFolder
        $projectName = $global:foundationNamePrefix + "." + $foundation
        $testsProjectName = $global:foundationNamePrefix + "." + $foundation + "." + $global:testProjectName

        $childProject = $parentSolutionFolder.AddSolutionFolder($foundation)
        $childSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $childProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])

        $projectFile = $childSolutionFolder.AddFromTemplate($global:webTemplate,$newFolder, $projectName);

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:foundationPath + $foundation + $global:rolesFolder
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:foundationPath + $foundation + $global:serializationFolder
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:foundationPath + $foundation + $global:testsFolder
        $projectFile = $childSolutionFolder.AddFromTemplate($global:classTemplate,$newFolder, $testsProjectName);
    }

    $solution = Get-Interface $dte.Solution ([EnvDTE80.Solution2])
    $parentProject = $solution.AddSolutionFolder($global:FeatureFolderName)
    $parentSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $parentProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])

    foreach ($feature in $global:featureNames)
    {
        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:featurePath + $feature + $global:codeFolder
        $projectName = $global:featureNamePrefix + "." + $feature
        $testsProjectName = $global:featureNamePrefix + "." + $feature + "." + $global:testProjectName

        $childProject = $parentSolutionFolder.AddSolutionFolder($feature)
        $childSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $childProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])

        $projectFile = $childSolutionFolder.AddFromTemplate($global:webTemplate,$newFolder, $projectName);

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:featurePath + $feature + $global:rolesFolder
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:featurePath + $feature + $global:serializationFolder
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:featurePath + $feature + $global:testsFolder
        $projectFile = $childSolutionFolder.AddFromTemplate($global:classTemplate,$newFolder, $testsProjectName);
    }

    $solution = Get-Interface $dte.Solution ([EnvDTE80.Solution2])
    $parentProject = $solution.AddSolutionFolder($global:ProjectFolderName)
    $parentSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $parentProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])

    foreach ($project in $global:projectNames)
    {
        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:projectPath + $project + $global:codeFolder
        $projectName = $global:solutionName + "." + $project + "." + $global:websiteName

        $parentSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $parentProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])
        $childProject = $parentSolutionFolder.AddSolutionFolder($project)
        $childSolutionFolder = Get-Interface $childProject.Object ([EnvDTE80.SolutionFolder])

        $projectFile = $childSolutionFolder.AddFromTemplate($global:webTemplate,$newFolder, $projectName);

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:projectPath + $project + $global:rolesFolder
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    

        $newFolder = $global:helixPath + $global:projectPath + $project + $global:serializationFolder
        New-Item -ItemType Directory -Path $newFolder -Force    
    }

    Write-Host "Done creating Habitat Foundation Structure."
}

<# Purpose is to accept inputs #>
function Accept-VSSolutionNames
{
    do
    {
        cls
        $input = Read-Host "Please specify you solution name. This could be the company name or overall solution name. e.g. Acme or MSFT "

        if([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($input))
        {
            Write-Host "Empty solution name. Try again."
        }
        else
        {
            $global:solutionName = $input
        }
    }
    until (-not([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($global:solutionName)))

    do
    {
        $global:foundationNamePrefix = Read-Host "Please specify you foundation name prefix. e.g."$global:solutionName".Foundation"

        if([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($global:foundationNamePrefix))
        {
            Write-Host "Empty foundation name prefix. Try again."
        }
    }
    until (-not([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($global:foundationNamePrefix)))

    do
    {
        $global:featureNamePrefix = Read-Host "Please specify you feature name prefix. e.g."$global:solutionName".Feature"

        if([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($global:featureNamePrefix))
        {
            Write-Host "Empty feature name prefix. Try again."
        }
    }
    until (-not([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($global:featureNamePrefix)))

    do
    {
         Accept-Projects
         $input = Read-Host "Enter your Project name/Tenant/Site name or q to continue. (Habitat or Site1)"
         if ($input -eq 'q')
         {
            break         
         }
         elseif (-not([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($input)))
         {
               $global:projectNames.Add($input)
               #create foundation project          
         }
    }
    until ($input -eq 'q')

    do
    {
         Accept-FoundationProjects
         $input = Read-Host "Enter your Foundation project name or q to continue."
         if ($input -eq 'q')
         {
            break         
         }
         elseif (-not([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($input)))
         {
               $global:foundationNames.Add($input)
               #create foundation project          
         }
    }
    until ($input -eq 'q')

    do
    {
         Accept-FeatureProjects
         $input = Read-Host "Enter your Feature project name or q to continue."
         if ($input -eq 'q')
         {
            break         
         }
         elseif (-not([string]::IsNullOrWhiteSpace($input)))
         {
               $global:featureNames.Add($input)
               #create feature project          
         }
    }
    until ($input -eq 'q')
}

<# Confirm selections/input #>
function Confirm-VSSolutionNames
{
    cls
    Write-Host "Solution Name:" $global:solutionName
    Write-Host "Project Names:" $global:projectNames
    Write-Host "Foundation Name Prefix:" $global:foundationNamePrefix
    Write-Host "Feature Name Prefix:" $global:featureNamePrefix
    Write-Host "Foundation Projects:" $global:foundationNames
    Write-Host "Feature Projects:" $global:featureNames

    Confirm-Creation

    $input = Read-Host "Enter 1 to continue or q to exit."
    if ($input -eq 'q')
    {
        exit
    }
    elseif ($input -eq '1')
    {
        $dte.Solution.Create($global:helixPath, $global:solutionName)
        $global:solution = $dte.Solution
        $dte.ExecuteCommand("File.SaveAll")

        Create-HabitatFoundationFolders

        $solution = Get-Interface $dte.Solution ([EnvDTE80.Solution2])
        $parentFolder = $solution.AddSolutionFolder($global:ConfigFolderName)
        $dte.ExecuteCommand("File.SaveAll")
    }
}

<# Start function #>
function Lets-Rumble
{
    Write-Host "    )                 (                                  (                         "
    Write-Host " ( /(     (           )\ )     (         )               )\ )                   )  "
    Write-Host " )\())  ( )\(     )  (()/(     )\  (  ( /((             (()/(    (  (        ( /(  "
    Write-Host "((_)\  ))((_)\ ( /(   /(_)) ( ((_)))\ )\())\  (   (      /(_)) ( )( )\ `  )  )\()) "
    Write-Host " _((_)/((_)((_))\()) (_))   )\ _ /((_|_))((_) )\  )\ )  (_))   )(()((_)/(/( (_))/  "
    Write-Host "| || (_))| |(_|(_)\  / __| ((_) (_))(| |_ (_)((_)_(_/(  / __| ((_|(_|_|(_)_\| |_   "
    Write-Host "| __ / -_) || \ \ /  \__ \/ _ \ | || |  _|| / _ \ ' \)) \__ \/ _| '_| | '_ \)  _|  "
    Write-Host "|_||_\___|_||_/_\_\  |___/\___/_|\_,_|\__||_\___/_||_|  |___/\__|_| |_| .__/ \__|  "
    Write-Host "                                                                      |_|          "

    Get-HabitatFoundationFolder
    Accept-VSSolutionNames
    Confirm-VSSolutionNames
}

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Is Boost the secret of Sitecore performance?

Akshay Sura — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I have been doing quite a bit of performance testing lately. I promised Nathaneal Mann a while back that I would include Sitecore Boost while testing performance. Nat has done a lot of work around performance and he has put together Sitecore Boost. Its fairly simple to install and you can find all the information on his GitHub page: https://github.com/cardinal252/Sitecore.Boost

I did not did not modify any configuration after installation. I pushed the production code to the VM and ran the tests.

The code is based on the information provided in Bring it on! – The battle rages between Simple Injector and Microsoft DI in Sitecore Performance Testing land far far away! . It currently runs on Microsoft DI, Glass 4.3.

I ran a test as is and a test with just Boost installed on top of it.

Test Setup

The following test was run twice for Non-Boost and twice for Boost.

Performance

Page Timing Results

Final Result

Overall Boost did show performance improvement especially with processor time and queued requests. I have posted the comparisons for your review. As I mentioned, I did not make any config changes or code changes, just installed Boost. I will be doing some more performance tests to see if it stays consistent. Depending on your page and its renderings it will help a great deal.

If you have any questions about Boost, please be sure to reach out to Nathanael Mann.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

SQL Server PowerShell to Backup or Run Jobs using Octopus Deploy

Akshay Sura — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I had to re-tool our Continuous Integration and Deployment environments due to a Sitecore Helix based solution. As part of that process I ended up using Octopus Deploy for the first time and I love it. I do not know how I did not use it before. I will have an upcoming blog post on how I setup our Octopus Deploy environment.

As part of the Continuous Deployment using Octopus Deploy, I needed the production databases backed up before we pushed the code & items to the Production CM servers. Octopus gives you a lot of step template to do various tasks and some of them are related to the SQL Server.

There are a few specific to Sitecore as-well, one in particular by my Guitar friend Richard Seal.

The SQL templates rely on SQL Server PowerShell commandlets to run. Here is the process to install it and it has to be done in a specific sequence, unless you want to install everything. In my case, I wanted this to run in the context of the Production CM’s, so I kept it to what is necessary. Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=29065 and download & install the following in the order given below:

Once all three are installed you can use one of the SQL Server templates in Octopus and run it on that box.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Bring it on! - The battle rages between Simple Injector and Microsoft DI in Sitecore Performance Testing land far far away!

Akshay Sura — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sitecore 8.2 was released with Microsoft Dependency Injection and with the recent release of Sitecore 8.2.1 it was finally time for me to do what I have been promising. I wanted to take an existing solution which was on production using Simple Injector (My Favorite framework), test it again the same solution but with Microsoft DI.

So here is some information:

Two sites were setup, one for Simple Injector and one for Microsoft DI
The code is exactly the same, except the DI framework has been swapped out
No other code changes were made to the code base
The solution runs on 8.2 rev. 161115 (8.2 Update-1)
The solution uses Web API calls as well and so the Web API controllers were also registered
I used Kam‘s ServiceCollectionExtensions and made a change to include Web API controllers with the help of one Mr. Sean Holmesby. The modification is added as a comment on Kam’s Git.
Each site was isolated to an identical environment

You can refer to my previous blog post to implement Microsoft DI: Microsoft Extensions Dependency Injection (DI) with Sitecore 8.2 Sample Project

I ran the following two tests on both the sites:

Test 1

Test 2

While the both tests were running, I took some sample screenshots of the server performance and the current load. I also compared page load times for specific pages. Here are some screenshots.

Results of Test 1

Test 1 – Page Load Times – Simple Injector

Test 1 – Page Load Times – Microsoft DI

Test 1 – Server Performance – Simple Injector

Test 1 – Server Performance – Microsoft DI

Test 1 – Winner – Microsoft DI

Now for test 2!

Results of Test 2

Test 2 – Page Load Times – Simple Injector

Test 2 – Page Load Times – Microsoft DI

Test 2 – Server Performance – Simple Injector

Test 2 – Server Performance – Microsoft DI

Test 2 – Winner – Microsoft DI

Over all with Microsoft DI, the server performance was much better. Needless to say that I will be using Microsoft DI. Hope Sitecore can update the Microsoft DI version in the upcoming versions.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Helix and the re-tooling of your Continuous Integration and Deployments

Akshay Sura — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

“Helix is a set of overall design principles and conventions for Sitecore development.” Like other architectures and design principles, Helix also has pros and cons. You might hear “saves the developer from having to create these modules from scratch” or “improve the efficiency of your projects, reduce costs and time to market”. Great right? Not so fast!

The concept of Helix and the Habitat implementation are great. When you get behind a set of design principles, its easier to follow them and also easier to overlook/overcome the cons. The intent of Helix is great but the long term goal of saving time or money is yet to be seen in real life implementations.

I personally can share my journey when we complete 6 – 9 sites on our Helix bases solution by next year. Until then lets talk about tooling or re-tooling.

In my opinion, Helix = Tooling, there is nothing else to it. By adopting Helix, you are committing to its architecture which WILL disrupt your current CI and CD processes. But since we are committed to Helix, its our job to re-tool and get back on track.

A lot of people choose to start off with Habitat instead of starting from scratch using Helix principles, because they do not understand how to start from scratch or how to convert an existing solution to a Helix based solution.

Now back to re-tooling. We started off with Gulp in my blog post yesterday: Finally, with one great big Gulp, I conquered Sitecore Helix!

Today we will take a look at:

VSTS builds
Tweak Gulp to do builds the way we want it to
OctoPack
Octopus Deploy

VSTS

First lets check out the .gitignore file to make sure that node_modules/ is un-commented. Just like Nuget packages being stored in the packages folder, all the Node.js plugins are stored in the node_modules folder. You do not want these checked into the source control for several reasons. You want the build server to download both the Nuget packages and the Node.js plugins while doing the build.

Add the npm step to install Node.js packages and specify the working folder:

Add the Gulp step and specify the location for the gulpfile.js:

Notice that we are passing in some Arguments. Yeap, here I am sending in some information which could be used in the gulpfile.js. I am mainly interested in the BuildNumber, so that I can send the NuGet packages to my Octopus server with the version needed. Since we did not specify the Gulp Task(s), VSTS will run the default task.

Now that I am passing in the parameters, I need a way to consume it in my gulpfile.js.

Back to Gulp

To consume the parameters passed through VSTS, I use minimist (https://www.npmjs.com/package/minimist).

Install minimist: npm install minimist

Then add the following to the top of your gulpfile.js:

var minimist = require(‘minimist’);

Once that is done, add the following under the require statements:

var knownOptions = {
string: ‘buildNumber’,
default: { buildNumber: ‘unversioned’ }
}
var options = minimist(process.argv.slice(2), knownOptions);

The above basically gives us access to the BuildNumber paraments from VSTS.

Now its next for OctoPack.

OctoPack

I love OctoPack because its so simple and just gets the job done.

To start, simply install OctoPack on the project you want to generate the NuGet package on by running the following in the Package Manager Console:

Install-Package OctoPack

Once installed, you need to create a nuspec file for that project with the same name as the project with a nuspec extension. For example, if you project name is Company.Project.Website, you need a nuspec file at the root of that project called Company.Project.Website.nuspec. Here is a sample nuspec file:

In the nuspec file, be sure to give a value in all the attributes including iconUrl. The main section however is the . Specify the files which will be part of the NuGet package.

Once all of this is configured, you need a couple of things from your Octopus Server.

Octopus Server

I recently started used Octopus Deploy. I learned it by bothering two of my friends, the REAL Kam(ruz) and Google. I setup the environment and the deployments on Octopus are so easy. Some day soon I will do a session on Octopus deploy. Back to the topic of re-tooling.

We need to setup an API key in order to push our NuGet packages. Here is an article on How to create an API key. Also make sure that your Octopus admin URL is available to your build system, in this case VSTS.

Back to Gulp

Back in gulpfile.js, I tweaked the Build task to add additional parameters to execute the OctoPack. Here is a sample of that code:

Notice that we are specifying the Octopus Server URL with /nuget/packages, this is the destination for the NuGet packages we generate. Second, we are specifying the API key we generated, this is the means to authenticate, so please keep this key safely. Third, is the version number of the NuGet package, which plays a big role in Octopus deploys and we get that through the BuildNumber parameter processes using minimist NPM package.

I run a few other scripts in my Gulp to make sure all my dll’s from features and foundation projects are copied over to the project, minify css and js etc.

Once all of this is said and done, we should have a working Continuous Integration environment for a Helix based solution. My Octopus Deploy configuration, automatically deploys the new NuGet package to the dev environment.

The NuGet restore, NPM package install, Gulp build and OctoPack NuGet push is taking about 3.9 minutes on average and the auto deploy to development environment is taking about 5 minutes.

Setting up your local and a Continuous Integration/Deployment environments for Helix takes longer than your traditional Web solution but once you set it up properly you are good since you follow the FOLDER STRUCTURE. All scripts for building features, foundation projects and tenants are all dynamic.

I encourage you to discuss Helix/Habitat based conversations in the Sitecore Slack Helix-Habitat channel – https://sitecorechat.slack.com .

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Finally, with one great big Gulp, I conquered Sitecore Helix!

Akshay Sura — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

“Helix is a set of overall design principles and conventions for Sitecore development. Habitat is a real Sitecore project implemented on the Sitecore Experience Platform using Helix.” – Please ingrain this in your brain. It helps to download the source for Habitat as a reference, because you are going to need it and need it you shall!

You can download Habitat from: https://github.com/sitecore/habitat

You could read more about Helix here: http://helix.sitecore.net/

I did not choose Helix, Helix chose me. Based on conversations with Helix folks, it was apparent that Sitecore will push its partners and customers to get behind Helix. Although I am not sure when everyone or the majority will be on board with this. I was thrown into a project where they were trying to implement Helix but unfortunately it fell short in a few areas.

This was very apparent when I tried to get Gulp working.

One of the biggest issues is that devs fallback on others cleaning up their mess. In this case they fell back on TDS cleaning it up. TDS did a great job of packaging up the code and content, config transforms, etc. Since the code is packaged in an update package, custom post installation steps were needed to push them to the web root.

You can use the Multi-Project Package Bundling to easily package up Helix projects. Unfortunately this also meant that Helix principles were not followed to the T.

Earlier this month, HedgeHog posted FxCop rules for Sitecore Helix which should help a lot (http://www.hhog.com/blog/sitecore-helix-fxcop-rules/). At the end of the day it truly comes down to what technologies you want to use for your development & deployments.

FOLDER STRUCTURE, FOLDER STRUCTURE, FOLDER STRUCTURE is key. You enforce that, and you got some Structure 😉 and are part way into implementing a Helix solution.

Do not get me wrong, I am not a Helix expert nor am I a TDS expert. I learn as I go but this time I had no choice. I do not like to depending on third party technology for deployment. I like to streamline it as much as possible.

In this struggle/journey, I had to tackle the following:

VSTS – Visual Studio Team Services with a Git repo – https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/git/
OctoPack – Create Nuget packages from your builds – http://docs.octopusdeploy.com/display/OD/Using+OctoPack
Gulp – Gulpjs is a task/build runner – http://gulpjs.com/
Octopus Deploy – Octopus is a deployment automation tool – https://octopus.com/

Now, bare in mind that I have not used any of the above except VSTS for source control before this. I hope to document in detail what you need to do to get this working. If you are one of the fruits who knows all of some of these technologies, don’t hate yo!, share..

I have been using VSTS for a while for only source control and nothing else. When I tried to set it up for builds, I was pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was. We will come to this later.

Gulp

Now as for Gulp, I knew what it could be used for but had no clue how to use it or even how to get started. In order to get Gulp working, we needed Node.js running as well. In Visual Studio 2015, Node.js and Gulp are automatically installed so I did not have to do much.

Next, I looked at the Habitat source and copied the gulpfile.js, package.json and gulp-config.js files to the same location as the solution file. Deployments are specific to your company or team and cater to your individual needs. My script probably wont suffice for you but all I am trying to do here is to give you an example. Once I copied the three files, I included them in my solution.

gulp-config.js contains configuration strings with paths etc – Optional
gulpfile.js contains all the tasks you might end up using. Default task is executed if no startup task is specified.
package.json file contains the references to all the plugins which are installed and could be used by your gulpfile.js

Once that is done, open the Task Runner Explorer by going to View > Other Windows > Task Runner Explorer in your Visual Studio solution.

This will open the Task Runner Explorer window. This window is your best friend for Gulp tasks. You can run any and all tasks in your Gulpfile.js file.

Even though the gulpfile.js from the Habitat solution has a bunch of code, you might need to add/modify part of it. At first I played around with the tasks and found that the solution folder structure was not right. Please refer to http://helix.sitecore.net/principles/file-structure/index.html

In my case, the default scripts did not suffice as I was using TDS for item deployment and not Unicorn. Gulp is very well documented and so all you need to do is google what you are looking for.

Most likely you will be asked to install Gulp plugins or end up on http://gulpjs.com/plugins/ .

When you encounter commands such as these npm install –save gulp-uglifycss , all you need to do is to open a command window or a windows PowerShell window and navigate to the location of the gulpfile.js. You would run the npm command at that location. By running the Node.js command, it will install the plugin and make an entry in the package.json file.

Once that is complete you would need to modify your gulpfile.js to add a required statement like the one shown below:

var concat = require(‘gulp-concat’);
var uglify = require(‘gulp-uglify’);
var zip = require(‘gulp-zip’);
var minimist = require(‘minimist’);

This would give you access to using a specific plugin in Gulp. From here on, its tweaking tasks, calling one task from the other and getting Gulp to do what you need it to do, all the while running it from the Task Runner window to make sure its working the way you need it to.

Here is my default task:

Once you have your Gulp task running and you are happy with it, we need to deal with automated builds. We will tackle VSTS and OctoPack in the next blog entry.

I encourage you to discuss Helix/Habitat based conversations in the Sitecore Slack Helix-Habitat channel – https://sitecorechat.slack.com .

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 9

Akshay Sura — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda – Presented by Amanda Shiga

Data enrichment and personalization
1. Getting started: the importance of xDB data enrichment
2. Building your strategy: types of personalization in Sitecore and how/when to apply them
3. Keeping personalization manageable for marketing ops and website performance
4. Measuring success: how to determine if personalization is making a difference
5. Useful extensions: some helpful approaches to extend Sitecore’s personalization capabilities

Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 9 on January 12th, 2017 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST at:

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2535764463444191236~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

Video

Links from the Presentation

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 8

Akshay Sura — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda – Presented by Jason St-Cyr

Continuous Integration and Deployment
1. Continuous Everything: Improvement, Integration, Testing, Delivery, Deployment
2. Continuous Integration: The Dirty Details
3. Continuous Testing: The test team in the deployment pipeline
4. Production Deployments: The Big Bad Wolf
5. Demo on setting up a simple CI setup (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

Video

Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 8 on November 30th, 2016 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST at:

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4352811881652099330~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 6

Akshay Sura — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda for the sixth Unofficial Sitecore training session

Customizations
1. Pipelines & Processors
  1. What is a pipeline?
  2. What is a processor?
  3. Existing Pipelines in Sitecore
  4. Implement custom functionality in a pipeline
  5. Demo on customizing httpRequestBegin pipeline (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
  6. Can I create my own pipeline?
2. Events & Commands
  1. Customizing Events
  2. Demo on adding custom item:saved event handler
  3. Create Custom commands

Source Code

Link to GitHub source.

Video

Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 6 on November 10th, 2016 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST at:

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/890111116093814531~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 7

Akshay Sura — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda – Presented by Vasiliy Fomichev

Best Practices
- Naming conventions
- Provide help to content authors
- Validation
- Datasources
- Scaling
- CD CM configs
- Media handling
- Caching
- Workflow

Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 7 on December 8th, 2016 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PST at:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8760359272621483523

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 5

Akshay Sura — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda – Presented by Michael West

Introduction to Sitecore PowerShell Extensions
1. Intro to SPE
2. No Coding Required
3. Nuts & Bolts
4. Advanced Capabilities
Out of the Box
1. Bundled Tools
2. Audit Reports
Meat & Potatoes
1. Windows PowerShell for Beginners
2. Console and ISE
3. Scripts, Libraries, and Modules
4. Integration Points
Remoting
1. Setup
2. Remote Code Execution
3. Best Practices

Video

Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 5 on November 16th 17th, 2016 8:00 PM (20:00) – 9:00 PM (21:00) PST at:

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7488577262485271297~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

How can you help the Stack Exchange Beta site for Sitecore

Akshay Sura — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A month ago Mark Cassidy took the initiative to start a Stack Exchange beta site. In doing so we got the community together and got them to commit to the cause. The community rose to the occasion was were quickly in beta. It was the fastest path to beta and other users were questioning how we got here. See the screenshot at the bottom of this post.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/101710

Stack Exchange is a perfect searchable platform for Sitecore Q & A. Even with other tools out there, we noticed fragmentation of Q & A on all the tools. We are hoping to centralize that.

What can you do to help?

Well for one, you need to get on to the beta site at http://sitecore.stackexchange.com/.

If you do not have a beta invite, get in touch with any of the prominent Sitecore guys on LinkedIn, Twitter or Slack and get an invite. You can also fill in this form.

If you are already on it, here is what we need:

Ask Sitecore and Sitecore module related questions on Sitecore.StackExchange.com.
Tag your questions with appropriate tags.
Use the tags already on http://sitecore.stackexchange.com/tags or add new ones which you do not see.
Comment, answer and up vote as necessary.
Build your rep on the beta site, we need people with more than 200 rep
Remember, even if you do not know the answer, you could point the person to the right direction by suggesting appropriate resource(s).
If you have questions about the beta Stack Exchange site itself, post questions at http://meta.sitecore.stackexchange.com/

Lets put some effort and make this beta count. Lets show the strength of the Sitecore community.

We need to satisfy the following criteria to get out of beta.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Microsoft Extensions Dependency Injection (DI) with Sitecore 8.2 Sample Project

Akshay Sura — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sitecore 8.2 was released with Microsoft Dependency Injection. I wanted to try to setup a sample project which utilizes the DI.

First and foremost, I thank Kam for writing the ServiceCollectionExtensions and making my life easier.

As with everything we start with a fresh install of Sitecore 8.2 (sc82rev160729). Following which setup a base visual studio project. I setup a very basic controller rendering to test this out. Here is the setup for the functionality of the TextBlock. The code necessary for Glass can be found in my previous blog posts. Later on I will get into the config.

Here is a simple Business Interface and class implementations:


using SC82.Models.Templates.Content;

namespace SC82.Business.Content
{
    public interface IContentLogic
    {
        ITextBlock GetTextBlock();
    }
}


using SC82.Business.GlassSC;
using SC82.Models.Templates.Content;

namespace SC82.Business.Content
{
    public class ContentLogic : IContentLogic
    {
        private readonly IControllerSCContext _currentContext;

        public ContentLogic(IControllerSCContext currentContext)
        {
            _currentContext = currentContext;
        }

        public ITextBlock GetTextBlock()
        {
            return _currentContext.GetDataSource();
        }
    }
}

Lets go ahead and define Controller and the View:


using SC82.Business.Content;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace SC82.Controllers
{
    public class ContentController : Controller
    {
        private readonly IContentLogic _contentLogic;

        public ContentController(IContentLogic contentLogic)
        {
            _contentLogic = contentLogic;
        }

        public ActionResult RenderTextBlock()
        {
            return View(_contentLogic.GetTextBlock());
        }
    }
}


@inherits Glass.Mapper.Sc.Web.Mvc.GlassView
@using Sitecore.Mvc

@if (Model != null)
{
    @Editable(Model, y => y.Heading)
    @Editable(Model, y => y.SubHeading)
    @Editable(Model, y => y.Content)
}

Now that we have everything set in terms of functionality. We need plumbing (funnel connector) to register with the DI. We do this by implementing an IServicesConfigurator and later on we will add the config to get this working.


using Glass.Mapper.Sc;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using SC82.Business.Content;
using SC82.Business.GlassSC;
using Sitecore.DependencyInjection;
using Sitecore.Foundation.DependencyInjection;

namespace SC82.Business.DI
{
    public class RegisterDI : IServicesConfigurator
    {
        public void Configure(IServiceCollection serviceCollection)
        {

            var serviceProvider =  serviceCollection.BuildServiceProvider();
            
            serviceCollection.AddTransient(provider => new SitecoreContext());
            serviceCollection.AddTransient(provider => new GlassHtml(serviceProvider.GetService()));
            serviceCollection.AddTransient(provider => new ControllerSCContext(serviceProvider.GetService()));
            serviceCollection.AddTransient();

            serviceCollection.AddMvcControllers(
                "SC82*");
        }
    }
}

Now that we registered all the items we need, next is the config (which is one of a few ways) to let Sitecore know:

That is it. I could not believe how simple this was. If you have more registrations, simple add it to the Configure method. When its all said and done, here is the output.

Make sure all the interfaces you need are registered. Check the /sitecore/admin/ShowServicesConfig.aspx page for registrations via the Microsoft DI in Sitecore ONLY. If you use a different DI framework, it will not show your registrations on this page.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Documentation on Microsoft DI: https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/fundamentals/dependency-injection.html

IoC Container Benchmark comparison 2016 including Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection

Akshay Sura — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

As most of you know, my favorite is SimpleInjector. I use it in all my projects. Since Sitecore 8.2 was released yesterday (August 30th 2016), I decided to do a performance benchmark against Microsoft Extensions DependencyInjection which is used as part of Sitecore to provide DependencyInjection.

Kam has written a blog post: Dependency Injection in Sitecore 8.2 which talks about the Sitecore integration.

I ran these tests on a virtual with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4870HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz with 8GB memory.

My source is available on GitHub: IoC Performance

In order to do this I have taken two approaches. First, I used the repo from Daniel Palme and his blog post: IoC Container Benchmark – Performance comparison and I updated the NuGet packages. Here is a blurb from Daniels post about the setup:

The test setup

Several benchmarks are executed to test the performance of the containers in different scenarios. Every container is initialized with a couple of interfaces and their corresponding implementations. The types are registered with different lifetimes to support the various benchmarks.

Every interface is resolved 500.000 times during the benchmark and the time is measured in milliseconds. Each test is executed single threaded and multi threaded.

The benchmarks:

Singleton: Objects with is singleton lifetime are resolved
Transient: Objects with is transient lifetime are resolved
Combined: Objects with two dependencies (singleton and transient lifetime) are resolved
Complex: Objects with several nested dependencies are resolved
Property: Objects which require property injection are resolved
Generics: Objects with a generic dependency are resolved
IEnumerable: Several objects that implement the same interface are resolved
Conditional: Objects with a conditional dependency are resolved
Child Container: Objects are resolved trough a child container
Interception With Proxy: Objects with a dynamically generated wrapper are resolved
Prepare And Register: Initializes container and registers some basic elements (executed 3.000 times)
Prepare And Register And Simple Resolve: Initializes container and registers some basic elements. The resolves two objects (executed 3.000 times)

First value: Time of single-threaded execution in [ms]
Second value: Time of multi-threaded execution in [ms]

That produced the following results:

	Version	Singleton	Transient	Combined	Complex	Property	Generics	IEnumerable	Conditional	Child Container	Interception With Proxy	Prepare And Register	Prepare And Register And Simple Resolve
No		56 89	72 104	105 124	134 134	148 146	96 110	305 231	98 118	606 391	72 105	2	3
AutoFac	4.1.0.0	602 508	1240 785	3760 2108	10242 6385	18682 10466	2632 1592	10363 5634		37968 20398
Microsoft Extensions DependencyInjection	1.0.0.20622	156 220	140 144	320 318	729 830		198 186	738 448				18	25
Ninject	3.2.2.0	3932 2588	13965 11564	37197 25070	103800 64927	93449 69829	37011 26061	91829 68581	34162 23586	62954750* 75133444*	102117 99437	129042	115231
SimpleInjector	3.2.2.0	66 101	87 120	151 159	188 176	270 218	100 131	854 520	121 144		28926 30097	419	3359

Second, I took the repos from:

IOCBattle by Martin From
IOCBattle by Nathanael Mann

To get the following results:

	Version	Singleton Reg. (ms)	Singleton Resolve (1,000,000) (ms)	Transient Reg. (ms)	Transient Resolve (1,000,000) (ms)
new ()		0.0726	57.6387	0.0683	200.6526
AutoFac Lambda	4.1.0.0	54.8336	453.2864	2.1957	6569.4292
AutoFac	4.1.0.0	4.8632	464.7712	0.7575	16183.6045
Microsoft Extensions DependencyInjection	1.0.0.20622	0.5311	66.0343	0.4936	198.7997
Ninject	3.2.2.0	34.5873	3343.113	1.6425	186098.403
SimpleInjector	3.2.2.0	31.0477	104.6839	2.5184	225.4272

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Links:
IoC Container Benchmark – Performance comparison
IoC Battle in 2015 results: Using Ninject – think again!

*Due to the updated AutoFac version I was getting some issues with Daniels code. I will resolve it at a later date and retest it.

Secure Sitecore : Secure Headers XSS Protection

Akshay Sura — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

We have been going through XSS vulnerability in the past two posts. I am going to end this series with one last post about Secure Headers. We will go through a few headers that we can implement.

Environment testing was done on two Windows 10 machines with Sitecore 8.1 update 3. Browsers use were Chrome (), Firefox (47.0.1), Microsoft Edge (25.10586.0.0 and Internet Explorer 11 (11.494.10586.0). Fresh installs on both, no config patches or customizations.

You can protect your self with headers without any need for code. Some of the headers which are recommended are:
HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)
HSTS informs browsers that the communication should only happen in HTTPS and not in HTTP.

HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP)
HPKP informs browsers to associate a specific cryptographic public key with a specific web server to prevent Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks with forged certificates.

X-Frame-Options
The X-Frame-Options header indicates if a browser should allow the render of a page in a frame, iframe or object. By implementing this header a site can avoid clickjacking attacks, by ensuring that the content is not embedded into other sites.

X-XSS-Protection
The X-XSS-Protection informs your browser to enable XSS filter in your browser. Not all browsers support this header.

X-Content-Type-Options
The X-Content-Type-Options header prevents MIME type confusion attacks by enforcing MIME types on script and style elements.

Content-Security-Policy
The Content-Security-Policy header prevents XSS attacks by dictating what kind of resources can be loaded into the browser.

Bas Lijten has written a few blog posts to go over some of the above. Here are the links: Sitecore Security #3: Prevent XSS using Content Security Policy & Sitecore Security #2: Secure connections and how to force the browser to use the secure connection.

X-Xss-Protection
This header configures the built in reflective XSS protection found in some modern browsers. Valid settings are:
0 – disable the protection
1 – enable the protection. If the browser detects an attack, the browser will sanitize the page
1; mode=block – enable the protection & block the response. If the browser detects an attack, the page will not be loaded and the browser wont sanitize the page
1; report=http://[YOURDOMAIN]/your_report_URI – enable the protection. If the browser detects an attack, he browser will sanitize the page and report the violation

By default we do not get many headers from the base install of Sitecore.

Lets do some testing.

X-Xss-Protection “0” – Disable

Now we load http://local.testsc8.com/?special=%3Cscript%20src=%22https://somedomain.com/somescript.js%22%3E%3C/script%3E on a page which consumes the special query string parameter and renders it on the page causing the script to execute.

The header gets loaded as we expected but on closer look on all four browsers, each acts differently. Chrome and FF load the script where as Microsoft Edge and IE11 do not load the script. We also do not see any console output.

X-Xss-Protection “1” – Enable & Sanitize

Now we load http://local.testsc8.com/?special=%3Cscript%20src=%22https://somedomain.com/somescript.js%22%3E%3C/script%3E . Something very interesting happens:

Chrome, Microsoft Edge and IE11 respect the header value of 1 and do not load the script.
Chrome, Microsoft Edge and IE11 show a console message.
Props to IE11 (never thought I would say this about IE), it even shows a very visible notification to the user.
Firefox on the other hand still loads the scripts and completely ignores the header.

X-Xss-Protection “1; mode=block” – Enable & Block

Now we load http://local.testsc8.com/?special=%3Cscript%20src=%22https://somedomain.com/somescript.js%22%3E%3C/script%3E . All browsers behave differently yet again:
Chrome does not load any content. No output in Network or Console tabs.
Firefox loads all the content including the offending script. No output in console.
Microsoft Edge and IE11 do not load any content. The console shows error message and the network tab shows the request.

As you can see each browser behaves differently. I would say in this case FireFox is the worst. We are unable to get full protection from all browsers with the X-XSS-Protection. This should show us that there is no silver bullet. We would need to implement multiple protections to remedy the XSS vulnerability.

You can use a third party site like securityheaders.io to evaluate your site.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Secure Sitecore : Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability Prevention

Akshay Sura — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

In the last Cross Site Scripting (XSS) post: Secure Sitecore : Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability Findings , we looked at how these attacks might look based on the browser the user is using. The interesting factor is that a potential attacker might not use a browser at all. You do not need a browser to initiate requests and process them. Fuzzing is a common technique where an attacker can create potentially invalid requests from scratch to perform testing on applications, to see how they respond.

I would also recommend that you go through the post: Sitecore Security #3: Prevent XSS using Content Security Policy by Bas Lijten. Content headers can enforce security on browsers. Remember, each browser acts differently.

Based on the last post, I want to show you how to add in custom validation on requests. Because we are on 4.5, we have the ability to specify a Custom Request Validator. To do this lets do an sample in a true ASP.NET MVC application.

I created a sample MVC application with no custom coding. I added the following class for a custom Request Validator:


    public class CustomRequestValidation : RequestValidator
    {
        protected override bool IsValidRequestString(HttpContext context, string value, RequestValidationSource requestValidationSource, string collectionKey, out int validationFailureIndex)
        {
            validationFailureIndex = 0;

            switch (requestValidationSource)
            {
                case RequestValidationSource.QueryString:
                    WriteLog(value, requestValidationSource, collectionKey);
                    return false;

                    break;
            }

            return base.IsValidRequestString(context, value, requestValidationSource, collectionKey, out validationFailureIndex);
        }
}

Here is are the web.config entries related to compilation and httpRuntime:

The output is what we expected. Any request with a QueryString will and should result in an error.

The default ASP.NET MVC app, hits the return false which causes the invalid value error and stops.

Now lets take the default Sitecore install and make the same change by adding the CustomRequestValidation.


namespace TestXSS.Code
{
    public class CustomRequestValidation : RequestValidator
    {
        protected override bool IsValidRequestString(HttpContext context, string value, RequestValidationSource requestValidationSource, string collectionKey, out int validationFailureIndex)
        {
            validationFailureIndex = 0;

            switch (requestValidationSource)
            {
                case RequestValidationSource.QueryString:
                    return false;

                    break;
            }

            return base.IsValidRequestString(context, value, requestValidationSource, collectionKey, out validationFailureIndex);
        }
  }

Lets open the site using some QueryString params and see what happens.

As you can see, Sitecore somehow seems to move past it and continues to evaluate the other parameters. My initial thought was to some how detect the additional tags via the CustomRequestValidation but now that doesn’t look feasible.

There is processor called SupressFormValidation which triggers even before the CustomRequestValidation and here Sitecore basically suppresses the validations for specific urls. In doing so, my previous article show that we are getting inconsistent results. The default SupressFormValidation code is shown below:


using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Web;
using System;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Web;

namespace Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest
{
    /// 
    /// The suppress form validation.
    /// 
    public class SuppressFormValidation : PreprocessRequestProcessor
    {
        public SuppressFormValidation()
        {
        }

        /// 
        /// Suppresses the form validation exception that has been introduced in .NET 4.0 for Sitecore backend.
        /// 
        /// The pipeline arguments.
        /// Indicates that form validation exception occured for frontend.
        public override void Process(PreprocessRequestArgs args)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");
            if (WebUtil.ShouldIgnoreUrl(args.Context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath))
            {
                return;
            }
            try
            {
                NameValueCollection form = args.Context.Request.Form;
            }
            catch (HttpRequestValidationException httpRequestValidationException)
            {
                string rawUrl = args.Context.Request.RawUrl;
                if (!rawUrl.StartsWith("/sitecore/shell/", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) && !rawUrl.StartsWith("/sitecore/admin/", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) && !rawUrl.StartsWith("/-/speak/request/", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
                {
                    throw;
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Here is a possible remedy. Get the web.config back to normal without the CustomRequestValidation. We validate our query string parameters against RFC 3986 and if its violated we throw an error. Here is the modified SupressFormValidation:


using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest;
using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Web;

namespace TestXSS.Code
{
    public class SuppressFormValidation : Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest.SuppressFormValidation
    {

        public override void Process(PreprocessRequestArgs args)
        {
            bool isShell = CheckSitecoreUrl(args.Context.Request.RawUrl);

            if (isShell)
            {
                base.Process(args);
            }
            else
            {
                try
                {
                    if (IsSecurePayload())
                        base.Process(args);
                }
                catch (HttpRequestValidationException)
                {
                    throw;
                }
            }
        }

        private bool CheckSitecoreUrl(string url)
        {
            string[] exceptions = new string[]
            {
                "/sitecore/",
                "/WebResource.axd",
                "/ScriptResource.axd",
                "/Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd"
            };
            //"/sitecore/shell/",
            //"/sitecore/admin/",
            //"/sitecore/api/",

            foreach (string e in exceptions)
            {
                if (url.StartsWith(e, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
                {
                    return true;
                }
            }
            return false;
        }

        //just processing query string at this moment
        private bool IsSecurePayload()
        {
            bool returnVal = true;

            foreach (String key in HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString.AllKeys)
            {
                string value = HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString[key];
                if (!IsSecureParam(value))
                {
                    throw new HttpRequestValidationException("-*-*-*-*A potentially dangerous Request.RawUrl value was detected from the client " + value);
                }
            }

            return returnVal;
        }

        //RFC 3986 for query string - http://www.rfc-base.org/rfc-3986.html
        private bool IsSecureParam(string value)
        {
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(value) && !Regex.IsMatch(value, @"^[a-zA-Z0-9@.' _~-]{1,40}$"))
                return false;
            else
                return true;
        }
    }
}

Here is the patch config:



  
    
        preprocessRequest>
            
               TestXSS.Code.SuppressFormValidation, TestXSS

Now if we run the tests using urls regardless of the encoding:

The system functions the way we expect it to on top of the base validation by ASP.NET. Now if we get in to the Sitecore admin, we have no issues modifying items etc.

This is not limited to what I did, you can evaluate Form posts, cookies etc. You can check encoding as well as any custom rules you have for your system to be secure. We no longer have security mishaps when Chrome or FF encode their inputs.

Remember, we did not set the validation mode to 2.0, we left the default web.config and sitecore.config which defaults to framework 4.5.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Secure Sitecore : Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerability Findings

Akshay Sura — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Lately I have been focussed on OWASP Top 10 security guidelines and locking down sites. The next one on the list is Cross Site Scripting (XSS). According to OWASP:

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection, in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted web sites. XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user within the output it generates without validating or encoding it.

These tests were done on a base install of Sitecore where no changes were made to the Web.config and Sitecore.config. As of .NET 4.5 the Request Validation does not trigger until the data is requested. You could always use the Request.Unvalidated to access the potentially unsafe values coming in.

It is important to know that not all browsers are alike. Some are advanced in their implementations and some are not. Your solution has to deter potential risks from any browser.

First, load the site http://local.testsc8.com on all browsers to make sure its loading:

Following that, lets load it with some malicious params, http://local.testsc8.com/?q=

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

P.S. The Notorious F.I.G helped me out in the past and I drew inspiration from his script and updated it. (https://gist.github.com/kamsar/98681b73979adc89610c)

TIHIDI: Implement a simple view rendering in Sitecore MVC and Glass

Akshay Sura — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This blog post will go through how I setup a basic View rendering using Glass Mapper Model.

Visit http://www.glass.lu/mapper/sc for more information on Glass Mapper for Sitecore.

TIHIDI: Stands for This Is How I Do It. I am going to write a series of blog posts going through how I do Sitecore related work. Hope it helps you!

Lets start by adding a simple template called TextBlock.

Lets add some data we can use as a datasource.

Once that is setup, lets add the Model and the Mapping in our projects.


namespace TIHIDI.Models.Templates.Content
{
    public interface ITextBlock 
    {
        string Heading { get; set; }
        string SubHeading { get; set; }
        string Content { get; set; }
    }
}


using Glass.Mapper.Sc.Maps;
using TIHIDI.Models;
using TIHIDI.Models.Templates.Content;

namespace TIHIDI.Mapping.Templates.Content
{
    public class TextBlockMap : SitecoreGlassMap
    {

        public override void Configure()
        {
            Map(x =>
            {
                x.AutoMap();
            });
        }
    }
}

Once that is done, lets add a view in the web project.


@inherits Glass.Mapper.Sc.Web.Mvc.GlassView
@using Sitecore.Mvc

@if (Model != null)
{
    @Model.Heading
    @Model.SubHeading
    @Html.Raw(Model.Content)
}

Add an associated View rendering in Sitecore and add it to the item you like, in my case I am adding it to the home item. Build and publish. Publish in Sitecore as well.

In a client browser it looks good.

In the Page Editor, oops sorry Experience Editor, which took forever to load it looks good but I am unable to edit the content.

If you have a need for this content to be editable you would need to do a couple of things. One, you would need to specify the Id attribute for the Model and two, you need to use Glass methods to make these fields editable.


using System;

namespace TIHIDI.Models.Templates.Content
{
    public interface ITextBlock 
    {
        Guid Id { get; set; }
        string Heading { get; set; }
        string SubHeading { get; set; }
        string Content { get; set; }
    }
}


@inherits Glass.Mapper.Sc.Web.Mvc.GlassView
@using Sitecore.Mvc

@if (Model != null)
{
    @Editable(Model, y => y.Heading)
    @Editable(Model, y => y.SubHeading)
    @Editable(Model, y => y.Content)
}

Build and publish, load the page in Experience Editor and (after while) there ya have it!

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

TIHIDI: Install Sitecore Instance Manager (SIM)

Akshay Sura — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sitecore Instance Manager is a great utility if you are a Sitecore developer working on multiple projects. It gives you the ability to install, maintain and delete Sitecore sites on a local machine among other things. You no longer need to run the Sitecore install exe.

TIHIDI: Stands for This Is How I Do It. I am going to be writing a series of blog posts going through how I do Sitecore related work. Hope it helps you!

The newer versions of the SIM are ClickOnce installer based and makes it easy to install it on your machine.

You can go to the Sitecore Marketplace (https://marketplace.sitecore.net/) and search for “Sitecore Instance Manager”:

Or visit http://dl.sitecore.net/updater/sim/

Click on the SIM.Tool.application file which was downloaded.

Click the Install button on the prompt as shown below:

SIM starts to download on your machine.

If you are on Windows 10 (Windows 8 or later), you might see a prompt similar to the one shown below:

TEMPORARILY disable the SmartScreen setting by going to Control Panel> System and Security> Security and Maintenance> Windows SmartScreen> Change Settings:

Run the SIM.Tool.application again and follow the prompts.

Select the location where you will place the Sitecore installation zip files and location of your Sitecore license.xml file.

Specify the connection string to your local SQL Server.

Confirm the website location and click the Grant button.

If you installed your SQL Server to run under credentials other than Network Service account, you might see the error below:

Stop the SQL Server service, modify the settings to login as the Network Service and start the service.

Get back to the install and click the Grant button again. The install completed and you get the confirmation.

If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 3

Akshay Sura — Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda for the third Unofficial Sitecore training session

Serialization
- What is Serialization and how can it help me?
- Developing with common DB’s or Serialization
- Tools on the market
- Demo of Unicorn/Rainbow and TDS
ORM
- What is an ORM?
- What is a Mapper?
- What is a Wrapper?
- Tools on the market
- Demo of Glass, Synthesis and Fortis

Video of the Webinar

We have the following presenters:

~~Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 3 on June 7th, 2016 8:00 AM PDT at:~~

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/9071377023822453762~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Webinar Analytics

Session Q & A (thanks to Alan Yip for the suggestion)

Q. should we exclude __Created Date in TDS project?
A. _Created Date. You can if you want to….but it’s not required.

Q. youtube link given by mike in ppt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFYOTFjtel0 is not work
A. use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFYOTFjteI0

Q. Can i get a TDS trial license on my personal email?
A. yes

Q. Is there any best practice web resource/book/ebook link on TDS you could share?
A. The main TDS wiki is the best at the moment. http://hedgehogdevelopment.github.io/tds/ It’s a lot of text though, but should cover everything. The TDS YouTube Playlist is more interested for this sort of stuff. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb9QmtmxCbhl1uzG_XJ37Sc9fhsJNLfaM

Q. Can you edit the field’s text when using TextFor like using the Field renderer from Sitecore, when in Page Experience Edit mode on synthesis? or is it just raw text rendered on the page?
A. Yes you get experience editor with Synthesis

Q. By using Glass mapper, do you loose the editability in Page Editor if you’re using generated Models in MVC views?
A. Not from my experience – Akshay Sura

Q. How code generation create models?
A. T4 templates

Q. Hi,, can we create two TDS project for same content folder?
A. yes

Q. What is main benefit of use Synthesis?
A. The main benefit of using Synthesis is to avoid using magic strings or constants classes when accessing Sitecore items. It makes everything much more maintainable. As well the MVC rendering helpers keep view renderings very clean.

Q. What’s the recommendation for Content and TDS? Is is recommended to have the content synchronized? or to have a initial/base content in TDS? or not to have anything related content?
A. Depends on your need, mostly for the inital content.

Q. ORM is tightly coupled with TDS? could be or we can use ORM indepedently as well ?
A. you can use it independently or closely coupled

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 4

Akshay Sura — Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Agenda for the fourth Unofficial Sitecore training session

Presentation eh!
- Types of Renderings
- Importance of Datasources
- Datasource restrictions
- Placeholder settings
- Page Editor friendly pages
- Parameter templates
- Demo on building a rendering and configuring it properly in Sitecore (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
Admin Duties
1. Module installation via installation wizard
2. Package installation via update installation wizard
3. Admin pages such as stats, cache, showconfig, etc

Source Code

Link to GitHub source.

Video

~~Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 4 on October 27th, 2016 2:00 PM (14:00) – 3:00 PM (15:00) PDT at:~~

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6906124171329030148~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds or Kamruz Jaman.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds or @jammykam on twitter or on Slack.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series - Session 2

Akshay Sura — Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

After a long hiatus, we finally are able to schedule the second session of the series.

Agenda for the second Unofficial Sitecore training session

Tour of Sitecore admin console (Content Editor, Media Library and Workbox)
Fields fields everywhere
- Simple Field Types
- Link Field Types
- List Field Types
- A Demo on using fields with base Sitecore API (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
More API
- Working with items (creating, modifying and deleting items)
- Demo on manipulating Sitecore items (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
- Sitecore Query
- Fast Query
- Demo of querying items (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machine

Video of the Webinar

~~Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 2 on May 26, 2016 9:00 PM PDT at:~~

~~https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8823055620741682435~~

~~After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.~~

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Webinar Analytics

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series - Session 1 - Plan C

Akshay Sura — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

What Happened??
First, we would like to apologize for the inconvenience. The webinar software crashed and google hangouts was having audio issues.

What we did?
We got a subscription to a more reliable webinar software GoToWebinar by Citrix. We are sending out this email to notify you of the rescheduled webinar.

We are rescheduling to March 3rd 2016 at 9 PM PST (Pacific Standard Time), 5AM GMT & 10:30 AM IST.

Please register for Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series – Session 1 – Plan C 😉 on Mar 3, 2016 9:00 PM PST at:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/757718915532440068

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Brought to you by GoToWebinar®

If you need more information get in touch with Akshay Sura or Mike Reynolds.

@akshaysura13 or @mike_i_reynolds on twitter or on Slack.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series

Akshay Sura — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

First these webinars are not intended for seasoned Sitecore developers. These are meant for basic Sitecore training to bridge a knowledge gap I have been seeing for a while in the community.

I notice a lot of experienced and junior .NET resources who are pushed into Sitecore with just the training and a cert. Most of the time these resources end up developing poor solutions which we all have to fix later on.

This has been going long enough. There have been many times when attendees at user groups approached experienced Sitecore devs asking questions they have spend hours to figure out. I feel like there is no MSDN version (I am talking about MSDN in 2003 when it was really good) for Sitecore for reference and even if there was, it might be difficult for those new to Sitecore to figure out what to search for.

One search in google will give you a ton on results from all over the place but its all over the place.

Hence this series.

I plan on running these webinars to get people trained up in Sitecore (Unofficially) so they make better decisions and help progress this great community of ours.

My partner in crime Mike Reynolds a two time Sitecore MVP will be working with me to deliver these sessions.

This first session will be held on Thursday February 25 2016 (9PM PST, 12AM EST, 5AM London – Feb 26, 7AM Istanbul – Feb 26, 10:30AM Delhi – Feb 26, 4PM Sydney – Feb 26).

1. Agenda for the first Unofficial Sitecore training sessions is listed below (306 registered)

Overview
- What is a Content Management System?
- What is Sitecore?
- Infrastructure perspective
- Author perspective
- Developer perspective
Installation
- Requirements
- Download and Install Sitecore from dev.sitecore.net
- SIM
Developing Sitecore
- MVC – what MVC? ya mean Sitecore MVC?
- Structure
- Presentation (View & Controller Rendering)
- Templates and Inheritance
- Standard Values
- Data binding
API
- Basic Sitecore API
- A Demo on rendering a simple menu (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

Each training session will last 2 hours. Will be focused and we will take questions.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch with me.

Here is a link to the Full Curriculum.

Unofficial Sitecore 8 Training Webinar Series - Full Curriculum

Akshay Sura — Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

We got a lot of requests to post our plan and here goes. This is what we have in mind for now. Depending on how popular these are we will add more.

Here is the list of webinars that are planned (Each training session will last 2 hours. Will be focused and we will take questions.):

1. Agenda (306 registered)

Overview
- What is a Content Management System?
- What is Sitecore?
- Infrastructure perspective
- Author perspective
- Developer perspective
Installation
- Requirements
- Download and Install Sitecore from dev.sitecore.net
- SIM
Developing Sitecore
- MVC – what MVC? ya mean Sitecore MVC?
- Structure
- Presentation (View & Controller Rendering)
- Templates and Inheritance
- Standard Values
- Data binding
API
- Basic Sitecore API
- A Demo on rendering a simple menu (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

2. Agenda (257 Registered)

Tour of Sitecore admin console (Content Editor, Media Library and Workbox)
Fields fields everywhere
- Simple Field Types
- Link Field Types
- List Field Types
- A Demo on using fields with base Sitecore API (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
More API
- Working with items (creating, modifying and deleting items)
- Demo on manipulating Sitecore items (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
- Sitecore Query
- Fast Query
- Demo of querying items (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

3. Agenda (230 Registered)

Serialization
- What is an Serialization and how can it help me?
- Developing with common DB’s or Serialization
- Tools on the market
- Demo of Unicorn/Rainbow and TDS
ORM
- What is an ORM?
- What is a Mapper?
- What is a Wrapper?
- Tools on the market
- Demo of Glass, Synthesis and Fortis

4. Agenda (160 Registered)

Presentation eh!
- Types of Renderings
- Importance of Datasources
- Datasource restrictions
- Placeholder settings
- Page Editor friendly pages
- Parameter templates
- Demo on building a rendering and configuring it properly in Sitecore (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
Admin Duties
1. Module installation via installation wizard
2. Package installation via update installation wizard
3. Admin pages such as stats, cache, showconfig, etc

5. Agenda (87 Registered)

Introduction to Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (Michael West)
1. Intro to SPE
2. No Coding Required
3. Nuts & Bolts
4. Advanced Capabilities
Out of the Box
1. Bundled Tools
2. Audit Reports
Meat & Potatoes
1. Windows PowerShell for Beginners
2. Console and ISE
3. Scripts, Libraries, and Modules
4. Integration Points
Remoting
1. Setup
2. Remote Code Execution
3. Best Practices

6. Agenda (74 Registered)

Customizations
1. Pipelines & Processors
  1. What is a pipeline?
  2. What is a processor?
  3. Existing Pipelines in Sitecore
  4. Implement custom functionality in a pipeline
  5. Demo on customizing httpRequestBegin pipeline (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)
  6. Can I create my own pipeline?
2. Events & Commands
  1. Customizing Events
  2. Demo on adding custom item:saved event handler
  3. Create Custom commands

7. Agenda (Postponed)

Best Practices (Vasiliy Fomichev)
- Naming conventions
- Provide help to content authors
- Validation
- Datasources
- Scaling
- CD CM configs
- Media handling
- Caching
- Workflow

8. Agenda (167 Registered)

Continuous Integration and Deployment (Jason St-Cyr)
1. Continuous Everything: Improvement, Integration, Testing, Delivery, Deployment
2. Continuous Integration: The Dirty Details
3. Continuous Testing: The test team in the deployment pipeline
4. Production Deployments: The Big Bad Wolf
5. Demo on setting up a simple CI setup (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

9. Agenda (72 Registered)

Data enrichment and personalization (Amanda Shiga)
1. Getting started: the importance of xDB data enrichment
2. Building your strategy: types of personalization in Sitecore and how/when to apply them
3. Keeping personalization manageable for marketing ops and website performance
4. Measuring success: how to determine if personalization is making a difference
5. Useful extensions: some helpful approaches to extend Sitecore’s personalization capabilitie

10. Agenda

Search baby!
1. Sitecore search basics
2. Main search technologies
3. Demo of Lucene, Solr and Coveo search
4. Search API
5. Inbound filters
6. Computed fields
7. Demo on search using Lucene (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

11. Agenda

Buckets – what buckets yo! (Mike Reynolds)
1. Item Buckets
2. Bucketing Strategies
3. Item Bucket customizations
4. Demo on Item Buckets (participants are encouraged to follow along with the demo on their machines)

12. Agenda

Infrastructure take 2
1. Build automation tools
2. Scaling
  1. ScalabilitySettings.config
  2. Multi environment configuration including CD/CM configs
  3. Sample Scaling options
  4. Caching
3. More to come!

13. Agenda

Commerce What? Who? Which?
1. How to E-Commerce in Sitecore?
2. Tools on the market
3. Active Commerce by Nick Wesselman
4. Sitecore Commerce
5. uCommerce

More to come on Security, Publishing, Rules engine, xDB, Personalization, WFFM, Powershell and other modules.

If you have any questions please do get in touch with Mike Reynolds or I.

How to join Sitecore Slack Community Chat

Akshay Sura — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I started the Sitecore Slack channel nearly two months ago (8/30/2015) along with the help of Mike Reynolds and Johann Baziret. It’s amazing to see the growth of the community channel and the need for it. Here are some stats from today:

There are ~~322~~ 1300+ members on the Sitecore Slack community as of today.

I honestly think that I would not have been able to chat with my fellow Sitecore developers from across the world, if it weren’t for Slack.

Need an Invite? – Submit an entry through this form https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bAVDgP5-FhFh8ohPchHtifq-rz7EBkuPojAzdEofJyo

Feels like we are not only getting to know each other but modules like Sitecore Powershell, Glass and Unicorn are getting first hand feedback, thereby getting more releases out.

The plus side is all the laughs you get from the creative Giphy (fails!) and Meme’s.

We currently have a few admins who can help you get on Slack or help you get into channels/private groups. If you need to get on slack, message any of the following on Twitter or LinkedIn:

If you have questions or comments, please be sure to get in touch with me. As always, I love to be part of this great Sitecore Community. Live and Breathe Sitecore.

A special shout out to Pieter Brinkman, who always volunteers to help with making the community better. In this case to a paid subscription of slack which is not needed the way we use it.

Another shout out to Kamruz Jaman for being the integration man!

SUGCON - Sitecore User Group Conference - Status: Rocked it!

Akshay Sura — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

SUGCON Started about 5 months ago when we saw a need for a country wide developer conference. I teamed up with Mike Reynolds, BrainJocks (Sue Klumpp) and HedgeHog (Mike Shaw).

We never ever thought that we would have an issue with going over our initial limit of 200 registrations. Thanks to the sponsors and a strong community we did very well.

The conference was for the community by the community.

I want to call out Pieter Brinkman from Sitecore who helped us out a lot.

I would like to thank the sponsors, the speakers and the attendees of the conference. Without you we would not have had a successful conference.

I want to emphasize that we have an amazing community. Its amazing how we all know each other and share with each other.

The main surprise was that Mike and I opened the event with a performance, here is the video:

Here are some amazing stats:

370+ Attendees

56 MVPs

37% End Users

67 Submissions

42 Presentations

>40 Hours of Sessions

More stats…

Thanks to Sitecore and Sitecore employees for your support and for taking the time to travel & speak at SUGCON.

In the future we plan to do SUGCON NA on Non-Symposium years.

I want to encourage everyone to share their knowledge. Without sharing there is no growth.

Go above and beyond. Look at our MVP’s, they have their regular jobs (60 hour weeks) but yet they go above and beyond and contribute. That is why they are MVP’s.

We as a community should be very proud to have pulled this off. The credit goes to each one of us!

You can visit www.sugcon.com for more information.

I also want to thank the Speakers for participating in our Lip Sync video.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch with me.

Sitecore Chat on Twitter - #TwitterChat #SitecoreChat

Akshay Sura — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Twitter chat concept has been around for a while now and its wildly successful in discussing topics specific to the community. In our case, I would like to organize #SitecoreChat on Twitter to discuss Sitecore related topics regularly. These could be topics about bug fixes, features on a specific version, a specific piece of functionality such as WFFM, etc.

Gone are the days of IRC chats and since our community is spread across the world, the chance of all of us being on the same chat platform like skype are not possible. I got a lot of information about Twitter chat and its benefits and would like to try it out in our community to see if it helps. Most of the information of twitter chat was gathered from prominent web authorities and their links and name are listed at the bottom of this post.

What is a Twitter chat?
A Twitter chat is a live Twitter event, usually moderated and focused around a general topic in our case Sitecore. A Twitter chat is where a group of Twitter users meet at a pre-determined time to discuss a certain topic, using a designated hashtag (#) for each tweet contributed. A host or moderator will pose questions (designated with Q1, Q2…) to prompt responses from participants (using A1, A2…) and encourage interaction among the group. Chats typically last an hour. The same social customs apply—courtesy and respect—and it’s a great way to meet new people with similar interests. There are Twitter chats in almost every industry imaginable.

In our case the Hashtag #SitecoreChat will be used.

Why participate in a Sitecore Chat (Twitter chat)?

Sitecore chats aim to provide a chance to network and knowledge through shared interests. I am sure we can discover a whole host of useful tips, and super savvy people whom we might not have otherwise connected with.

Tips for Sitecore Chat participants

Reply directly for targeted conversations with one or two people.
Include a “.” in front of an @ if you want your tweet to show up in all feeds. Do not start your tweet with @userhandle, this means that only the sender, the person mentioned and anyone who follows the person can see that tweet. Instead use a “.” if you are starting the tweet with a user handle.
It’s OK to dip in and out of a Twitter chat. Drop by for the time you have and don’t feel guilty if you can’t stay for the whole thing. Be polite and positive! 🙂
Don’t be afraid to contribute and jump in! It can be intimidating, but trust me, the moderators and participants will be glad to hear from you!
When answering a specific question or comment from another participant, use Twitter handles to identify who you’re speaking to in order to avoid confusion.
Remember Twitter chats are about connecting and learning, not selling your product. Use the time to provide as much value on the given topic as possible and show your expertise without over-promoting.
Always include the chat hashtag in your responses. In our case its #SitecoreChat
Follow up with people after the chat! Keep the conversation going or get to know fellow participants on a more personal level. You never know what new connections you can make!

Tools for a productive Sitecore Chat

Hashtag #SitecoreChat

Event Date/Time: Will be determined soon based on the Community response.

Sample Topics

Sitecore version specific bugs and possible fixes/workarounds
Features of a specific Sitecore version
WFFM with Sitecore MVC for version 8.x
SimpleInjector Issues with WFFM
xDB Usage thresholds
Real life experiences with xDB
etc.

Sources:

Buffer App

Forbes

If this works out, this might be something we can move to community.sitecore.net. If you have any questions or comments please be sure to get in touch with me. Thank you.

Custom computed fields in Tealium Tag Management for Sitecore

Akshay Sura — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

In the last blog post we looked at Tealium tag management for Sitecore. In this post we will cover customization available to enabled computed fields. By default you have access to the following out of the box fields:

item_id: “{110D559F-DEA5-42EA-9C1C-8A5DF7E70EF9}”
item_language: “en”
item_name: “Home”
item_path: “/sitecore/content/home”
item_template_id: “{32B25AF5-4043-4776-BC20-098339109A4C}”
item_template_name: “Home”

We also saw in the last post about how to add custom tags with fixed values (site_currency: [“USD”,”EUR”]). In the next post we will look at template specific tags and how we can render them.

For the purposes of this blog post, lets assume that we want the item url to be rendered as a tag. In order to make this available globally we can enable the Custom UDO property in /sitecore/system/Modules/Tealium Tag Management/Settings/Tealium Settings.

In order to do that we need to write some code which will inherit the IComputedFieldMapper interface.

using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement.Mappings
{
    public interface IComputedFieldMapper
    {
        void AddComputedFields(IDictionary utagParams);
    }
}

Follow the steps below:

In your assembly add a reference to the Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement.dll
Create a class TealiumComputedFields and inherit the IComputedFieldMapper, be sure to implement that interface

This will force you to define the AddComputedFields method, here add your code for the tags you would like to render

using Sitecore;
using Sitecore.Links;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement.Mappings;

namespace YOURNAMESPACE
{
    public class TealiumComputerFields : IComputedFieldMapper
    {
        public void AddComputedFields(IDictionary utagParams)
        {
            utagParams.Add("item_url", LinkManager.GetItemUrl(Context.Item));

            //Sad part is you get only one of these and if you need to cater to multiple templates or render based on multiple templates
            //you have to end up using switch/if statements to do conditional logic based on template
            //switch (Context.Item.TemplateName)
            //{
            //    case "Product": //logic
            //        break;
            //    case "Article": //logic
            //        break;
            //}
        }
    }
}

Edit /sitecore/system/Modules/Tealium Tag Management/Settings/Tealium Settings item and check the Enable Custom UDO check box
Set the Custom UDO Type based on the information from your assembly (YOURNAMESPACE.TealiumComputerFields,YOURASSEMBLY)

Sad part is that you only get one custom computed fields library and if you need to cater to multiple templates or render based on multiple templates, you have to end up using switch/if statements to do conditional logic based on template.

Here is the output generated:





    

    Sitecore Experience Platform

As usual if you have any questions or comments, please be sure to ping me.

Thanks.

Tealium tag management using Sitecore

Akshay Sura — Wed, 19 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

“The Tealium iQ™ tag management system is a powerful and highly extensible solution that helps marketers easily manage their mission-critical technologies across web and mobile channels. Tealium iQ drives the complexity out of vendor tag deployments and is the cornerstone for achieving unified marketing, i.e., the ability to harmonize applications and data to drive superior cross-channel customer interactions.” – Quoted from Tealium website.

According to Wikipedia: “Tag management is the ability to manage user-generated tags (also known as categories, taxonomies or folksonomies) within collaborative software. Tag management features and processes are put in place to encourage cross-user consistency, navigation efficiency and compliance with an existing taxonomy.”

There are several paid providers available on the market, some of them are:

Google provides a free tag manager called Google Tag Manager.

Moz has a great article about tag management here and Tealium also has an article about tag management available here.

For the purposes of this blog post lets stick to Tealium. Tealium released a Sitecore module which is available in the Sitecore Marketplace.

“Tealium’s tag management integration with Sitecore enables marketers to easily deploy and manage their tag-based online marketing solutions on their own, without sapping valuable IT resources. To take advantage, Sitecore clients simply install the certified Tealium plug in and drop a single line of code onto their web pages. They can then add, edit and remove any digital marketing vendor tag through a convenient web-based interface without ever touching the web page.” – Quoted from the Sitecore Marketplace module page.

One you are done installing the module from the Sitecore marketplace, you will end up with new items in /sitecore/templates/Tealium and /sitecore/system/modules/Tealium Tag Management folders. It also copies Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement.dll and Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement.config.

Now for configuration, head on over to /sitecore/system/Modules/Tealium Tag Management/Settings/Tealium Settings item where the most important part of the config is added:

Provide the appropriate information:

Enable: The enable setting adds Tealium Tags
Account: Tealium account name
Profile: Tealium profile name
Environment: Environment name (i.e. prod/qa/dev)
Enable utag.sync.js: If selected, utag.sync.js is added to the head for A/B testing and personalization solutions such as Adobe Target, Optimizely, etc. Enable Custom UDO: If selected, you can add additional name/value pairs
Custom UDO Type: Assembly/type for custom computed field(s) implementations

We will look into custom computed fields in the future blog posts.

Next go to /sitecore/system/Modules/Tealium Tag Management/Settings/Utag Data Mapping Settings and select appropriate boxes based on the information you need rendered. For the sake of this post I am going leave the default which has all the checkboxes checked.

You can also add additional custom params which get rendered without any logic. If you need multiple values, separate them by using comma (,) or pipe (|) delimiters. I will leave it default for now.

Tealium for Sitecore has this nice feature which lets you add custom mapping based on template. What that means is that if you have a product template, you can render that template specific tags when that item is rendered. By default Tealium provides an example for a sample product template:

We will look at the template mapping in detail in the later posts.

The Tealium config is shown below:

The next task is to include this in any layouts you might be using, to do this:

Add a reference to Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement.dll

In your layout file add the following at the top:


@using Sitecore.Mvc
@using Tealium.Sitecore.TagManagement
@{ var tealiumManager = TealiumFactory.TealiumManager;}

Next, add the following to the tag:



    
    
    

    
    

    @tealiumManager.HeadInjections()

Finally, add the following to the first line after tag:
```
    @tealiumManager.BodyInjections()
```

Now lets run the code. Here is the output:





    
    
    

    
    
    
    Sitecore Experience Platform

If you have any questions or concerns please get in touch with me. In the next post I will cover the customizations.

Testable and reusable Sitecore MVC solution using SimpleInjector, Glass 4, NUnit and NSubstitute

Akshay Sura — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I have been meaning to extract out this solution for quite a while but never got time to do this. Even now I would like to publish a lot more code but unfortunately that is going to take a while!

I pushed an update to GitHub (https://github.com/akshaysura/sitecoremvc) with the initial code. It currently does not have any unit tests but I will be pushing another update shortly.

First I would like to thank Mike Edwards and Nathanael Mann for helping me jump start my Glass knowledge. I was able to pick up Glass in no time.

The purpose of this solution is to give you a baseline solution on Sitecore MVC implementation. I have been using a flavor of this for a year now on various projects and found it to be very useful and setup in a way that lends itself to reuse and test-ability.

Now a note to the snuggle bunnies who just see the negative in the world: when a guy posts Sitecore tips you do not find what is wrong with it, you acknowledge that fact that this person is sharing it his/her knowledge and if you have a better way of doing it, say so! It does not cost you any more to be nice! If you know of a way to make this better, share it.

On another note, share your knowledge, no point in safeguarding it! The more you share the better the community gets.

Now back to the solution. It is no surprise that I love Simple Injector, its my favorite. You can read all about it in the links below:

https://simpleinjector.org/

Simple Injector Documentation

IoC Benchmark Performance

IoC Battle Results

I found the combination of SimpleInjector, Glass4 and Sitecore MVC to be very stable and fast. In comparison we ran tests of 1000 active users, hitting the site at the rate of 635 requests per second, and the load being taken by two load balanced servers. The servers did not flinch and stayed at 35% CPU or below. This is a great example of how this can help you. Of course having good caching wouldn’t hurt!

I also tried out Kam’s Unicorn with Rainbow, I have to say that its fast and easy to configure. Best of all it was seamless which is what attracted me to try it out!

I plan on adding a lot more functionality in the coming weeks. The concepts in this solution are nothing new but how all of it is brought together might be interesting. Typically code isn’t shared in the Sitecore community when it comes to the actual building of the solution, but if its a module of course people are willing to freely share.

I am also going to include several examples of how to decouple Sitecore from a solution with real world examples. You are encouraged to pick and choose the code as you wish.

One thing to point out is the way Simple Injector is being initialized. Typically this can be done via Global.asax, WebActivatorEx and/or a Pipeline (the Sitecore way). I chose to do it the Sitecore way and initialize it via config and a pipeline.


using SimpleInjector;
using Sitecore.Pipelines;
using SitecoreMVC.SCExtensions.DI;
using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace SitecoreMVC.SCExtensions.Pipelines.DI
{
    public class InitializeControllerFactory
    {
        public virtual void Process(PipelineArgs args)
        {
            SetControllerFactory(args);
        }

        protected virtual void SetControllerFactory(PipelineArgs args)
        {
            var container = new Container();

            PackageExtensions.RegisterPackages(container, AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().Where(a => a.FullName.StartsWith("SitecoreMVC."))); // you can customize this to what ever you need

            var simpleInjectorControllerFactory = new SimpleInjectorControllerFactory(container);
            var sitecoreControllerFactory = new Sitecore.Mvc.Controllers.SitecoreControllerFactory(simpleInjectorControllerFactory);

            ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(sitecoreControllerFactory);
        }
    }
}


using SimpleInjector;
using System;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;

namespace SitecoreMVC.SCExtensions.DI
{
    /// 
    /// Inspiration: http://blog.istern.dk/2012/10/23/sitecore-mvc-new-ninject-controller-factory-clean-version/
    /// 
    public class SimpleInjectorControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory
    {
        private Container _container;

        public SimpleInjectorControllerFactory(Container container)
        {
            _container = container;
        }

        protected override IController GetControllerInstance(RequestContext requestContext, Type controllerType)
        {
            return (IController)_container.GetInstance(controllerType);
        }
    }
}

If you have any questions or comments please let me know.

Execute Sitecore Powershell from Sitecron Schedule Job

Akshay Sura — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Yes you heard it right. I was planning on writing a couple of sample jobs to do indexing etc but then I realized why not make it a lot more powerful. So I decided to add support to run Powershell scripts.

As I mentioned earlier you can implement the IJob interface and implement what ever you choose to. I am including a default Powershell execute job which can take in the parameters you would like to pass to your script and specify a link to the Powershell Script item.

This gives you a lot of power in terms of the kind of functionality you can build. Better yet, you can tweak this functionality and re-run it without recompiling the code.

First I would like to go over the fields and what you can do with them:

Type: class namespace, assembly (e.g. Sitecron.Powershell.ExecuteScript, Sitecron)
Cron Expression: 0 15 10 * * ? (e.g. Fire at 10:15am every day)
Parameters: test=1&p=first (e.g. you can pass in anything like a guid/some value or values similar to the Sitecore parameters so that you can get a NameValueCollection. It all depends on your need.)
Items: Select one or more items you need to do the job. For instance if you need specific items to do import/rearrange items/rename etc.

I tried to make this generic so that based on your needs you can implement the IJob Quartz.NET interface and achieve the functionality you need.

From my testing the scheduled tasks always executed on time every time.

The other thing to note is that as part of the output, you can output the execution time and next scheduled execution time.


Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript Instance {0} of ExecuteScript Job - {5}Parameters: {1} ScriptIDs: {2} {5}Fired at: {3} 
{5}Next Scheduled For:{4}", context.JobDetail.Key, rawParameters, scriptIDs, context.FireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), context.NextFireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), Environment.NewLine), this);

Now for the Powershell script. Here is the code I implemented so that its part of Sitecron and you can utilize it or implement your own. Needless to say that in order for this Powershell job to run you would need to install Sitecore PowerShell module 3.1+

Adam Najmanowicz was nice enough to take time to suggest ways to implement it.


using Cognifide.PowerShell.Core.Host;
using Cognifide.PowerShell.Core.Settings;
using Quartz;
using Sitecore.Configuration;
using Sitecore.Data;
using Sitecore.Data.Items;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecron.SitecronSettings;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Linq;

namespace Sitecron.Powershell
{
    public class ExecuteScript : IJob
    {
        public void Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
        {
            JobDataMap dataMap = context.JobDetail.JobDataMap;

            string scriptIDs = dataMap.GetString(FieldNames.Items);
            string rawParameters = dataMap.GetString(FieldNames.Parameters);

            Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript Instance {0} of ExecuteScript Job - {5}Parameters: {1} ScriptIDs: {2} {5}Fired at: {3} {5}Next Scheduled For:{4}", context.JobDetail.Key, rawParameters, scriptIDs, context.FireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), context.NextFireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), Environment.NewLine), this);

            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(scriptIDs))
            {
                Database masterDb = Factory.GetDatabase("master");

                List scriptItems = new List();
                string id = scriptIDs.Split('|').FirstOrDefault(); //only doing the first script item, running multiple scripts can cause issues especially if they call other scripts etc.

                Item scriptItem = masterDb.GetItem(new ID(id));

                Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript: Adding Script: {0} {1}", scriptItem.Name, id), this);

                NameValueCollection parameters = Sitecore.Web.WebUtil.ParseUrlParameters(rawParameters);

                Run(scriptItem, parameters);
            }
            else
                Log.Info("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript: No scripts found to execute!", this);
        }


        private void Run(Item speScript, NameValueCollection parameters)
        {
            var script = speScript[ScriptItemFieldNames.Script];
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(script))
            {
                Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript: Running Script: {0} {1}", speScript.Name, speScript.ID.ToString()), this);

                //reset session for each script otherwise the position of the items and env vars set by the previous script will be inherited by the subsequent scripts
                using (var session = ScriptSessionManager.NewSession(ApplicationNames.Default, true))
                {
                    //here we are passing the param collection to the script
                    var paramItems = parameters.AllKeys.SelectMany(parameters.GetValues, (k, v) => new { Key = k, Value = v });
                    foreach (var p in paramItems)
                    {
                        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(p.Key)) continue;
                        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(p.Value)) continue;

                        if (session.GetVariable(p.Key) == null)
                        {
                            session.SetVariable(p.Key, p.Value);
                        }
                    }

                    session.SetExecutedScript(speScript);
                    session.SetItemLocationContext(speScript);
                    session.ExecuteScriptPart(script);
                }
            }

        }


        #region Multiple Scripts Scenario
        ////public void Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
        ////{
        ////    JobDataMap dataMap = context.JobDetail.JobDataMap;

        ////    string scriptIDs = dataMap.GetString(FieldNames.Items);
        ////    string rawParameters = dataMap.GetString(FieldNames.Parameters);

        ////    Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript Instance {0} of ExecuteScript Job - {4}Parameters: {1} {4}Fired at: {2} {4}Next Scheduled For:{3}", context.JobDetail.Key, scriptParams, context.FireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), context.NextFireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), Environment.NewLine), this);

        ////    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(scriptIDs))
        ////    {
        ////        Database masterDb = Factory.GetDatabase("master");

        ////        List scriptItems = new List();
        ////        string[] ids = scriptIDs.Split('|');
        ////        foreach (string id in ids)
        ////        {
        ////            scriptItems.Add(masterDb.GetItem(new ID(id)));
        ////            Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript: Adding Script: {0}", id), this);
        ////        }

        ////        NameValueCollection parameters = Sitecore.Web.WebUtil.ParseUrlParameters(rawParameters);

        ////        Run(scriptItems.ToArray(), parameters);
        ////    }
        ////    else
        ////        Log.Info("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript: No scripts found to execute!", this);
        ////}


        //////general bad practive here to allow multiple powershell scripts as there might be dependency
        //////of one script on another etc, should be one script per scheduled task
        //////this is shown as an example
        ////private void Run(Item[] speScripts, NameValueCollection parameters)
        ////{
        ////    foreach (var item in speScripts)
        ////    {
        ////        var script = item[ScriptItemFieldNames.Script];
        ////        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(script))
        ////        {
        ////            Log.Info(string.Format("Sitecron: Powershell.ExecuteScript: Running Script: {0} {1}", item.Name, item.ID.ToString()), this);

        ////            //reset session for each script otherwise the position of the items and env vars set by the previous script will be inherited by the subsequent scripts
        ////            using (var session = ScriptSessionManager.NewSession(ApplicationNames.Default, true))
        ////            {
        ////                //here we are passing the same param collection to all the scripts
        ////                var paramItems = parameters.AllKeys.SelectMany(parameters.GetValues, (k, v) => new { Key = k, Value = v });
        ////                foreach (var p in paramItems)
        ////                { 
        ////                    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(p.Key)) continue;
        ////                    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(p.Value)) continue;

        ////                    if (session.GetVariable(p.Key) == null)
        ////                    {
        ////                        session.SetVariable(p.Key, p.Value);
        ////                    }
        ////                }

        ////                session.SetExecutedScript(item);
        ////                session.SetItemLocationContext(item);
        ////                session.ExecuteScriptPart(script);
        ////            }
        ////        }
        ////    }
        ////}
        #endregion
    }
}

One thing to note here is that although we have the ability to select multiple items, in this case multiple Powershell Scripts, it is not a good practice to execute multiple scripts via code consecutively. There could be inter-dependencies, one of those scripts could be calling another script(s) etc. creating issues where there shouldn’t be one.

The intent is to select one item of type “PowerShell Script”. If multiple are selected this specific implementation will only pick the first one and ignore the others. I have included commented code which is capable of executing multiple script items but use it at your own risk.

I am posting the update to the module to the Sitecore Marketplace shortly. I updated GitHub.

GitHub: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron
Market Place: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron
For help with Cron Expressions you can use http://www.cronmaker.com/

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch with me.

Parameters in a Sitecron Job - Sitecore Scheduler Module updated! version 1.1.6

Akshay Sura — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

So it’s been a while since I have been using this module in production for a while and very happy with it. I made a few changes to help improve the usability. In this iteration I added the option to pass in parameters into the job when it runs. I have a nice surprise feature coming up shortly which will tie into this.

First I added a few checks and logging which helps us better manage the scheduled jobs. With the parameters, you can pass in parameters in which ever format as you like. It’s the job’s responsibility to utilize the parameters being passed to it.

For instance you can pass in “Testing123” or “someval=1&who=me&whichone=first”, in the later we could use the Sitecore util and treat it similar to the Sitecore parameters.

I modified the Sitecron Job template to include a Parameters field. If you choose to add a value you could do so in the job(s) in /sitecore/system/Modules/Sitecron

I setup two jobs:

and

Here is a sample test class which pulls in the parameters:


using Quartz;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace SampleJob.Parameters
{
    public class TestParams : IJob
    {
        public void Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
        {
            JobDataMap dataMap = context.JobDetail.JobDataMap;

            string jobParams = dataMap.GetString("Parameters");

            Log.Info(string.Format("Instance {0} of TestParams Job - {4}Parameters: {1} {4}Fired at: {2} {4}Next Scheduled For:{3}"
, context.JobDetail.Key, jobParams, context.FireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r")
, context.NextFireTimeUtc.Value.ToString("r"), Environment.NewLine), this);
        }
    }
}

Once the job executes you can see that it passes in the parameter values in these log entries:


DefaultQuartzScheduler_Worker-1 15:44:00 INFO  Instance DEFAULT.403e4e4c-2029-4311-ba12-7df4538a12ab of TestParams Job - 
Parameters: this is the parameters value 
Fired at: Mon, 03 Aug 2015 19:44:00 GMT 
Next Scheduled For:Mon, 03 Aug 2015 19:46:00 GMT

DefaultQuartzScheduler_Worker-2 15:45:00 INFO  Instance DEFAULT.12b63339-d791-42a2-a85b-a19f77b41db8 of TestParams Job - 
Parameters: print=1&target=me&group=first 
Fired at: Mon, 03 Aug 2015 19:45:00 GMT 
Next Scheduled For:Mon, 03 Aug 2015 19:48:00 GMT

Notice that you can output the execution time and the next scheduled execution time. This can be very useful.

GitHub: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron
Market Place: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron
For help with Cron Expressions you can use http://www.cronmaker.com/

If you need more information please do get in touch with me. I posted the update to the marketplace, I am waiting for the approval. Also I updated the GitHub.

Smart and Incremental publish using SiteCron for Sitecore

Akshay Sura — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

In this blog post we will be looking into building two SiteCron jobs, one for Smart publish and one for Incremental publish.

Add a reference to Quartz.dll in your project

Implement a new class called SmartSitePublishJob which implements Quartz.IJob, sample code is shown below:

    public class SmartSitePublishJob : IJob
    {
        public void Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
        {
            Log.Info("SmartSitePublishJob Execute - Start", this);

            Database master = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master");

            Database[] targetDBs = new Database[] { Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("web") }; //you can get this via config if you need customize targets
            Language[] languages = languages = LanguageManager.GetLanguages(master).ToArray();

            Sitecore.Publishing.PublishManager.PublishSmart(master, targetDBs, languages);

            Log.Info("SmartSitePublishJob Execute - End", this);
        }
    }

Implement a new class called IncrementalSitePublishJob which implements Quartz.IJob, sample code is shown below:

    public class IncrementalSitePublishJob : IJob
    {
        public void Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
        {
            Log.Info("IncrementalSitePublishJob Execute - Start", this);

            Database master = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master");

            Database[] targetDBs = new Database[] { Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("web") }; //you can get this via config if you need customize targets
            Language[] languages = languages = LanguageManager.GetLanguages(master).ToArray();

            Sitecore.Publishing.PublishManager.PublishIncremental(master, targetDBs, languages);

            Log.Info("IncrementalSitePublishJob Execute - End", this);
        }
    }

Build and deploy to the Sitecore folder
Login to Sitecore admin and go to /sitecore/system/Modules/Sitecron
Add a new SiteCron job and name it Scheduled Smart Publish and set the values accordingly (Mon – Fri, run at 6:15AM):
Add a new SiteCron job and name it Scheduled Incremental Publish and set the values accordingly (Mon – Fri, run at 3:30AM):
Once saved the jobs are added to the scheduler and triggered accordingly.

Here are some useful links:

Video: SiteCron Demo
GitHub: https://github.com/akshaysura/Sitecron
Market Place: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron
For help with Cron Expressions you can use http://www.cronmaker.com/
You can get more information about the Cron triggers and examples from Quartz.NET Scheduler website at: http://www.quartz-scheduler.net/documentation/quartz-2.x/tutorial/crontriggers.html

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch with me.

SiteCron Sitecore module for your everyday scheduling needs

Akshay Sura — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

SiteCron is a scheduling module based on Quartz.NET Job Scheduler. SiteCron can be used to create simple or complex schedules to execute jobs. This functionality is implemented using Quartz’s CronTrigger.

“Quartz.NET is a pure .NET library written in C# and is a port of very popular open source Java job scheduling framework, Quartz.”

Cron has been around for a long time and is known for its powerful scheduling capabilities. CronTrigger in Quartz is based on the scheduling capabilities of cron and uses “cron expressions” to execute the jobs. Cron expressions specify the condition to fire the job such as execute this job at 8AM each day.

The current implementation of SiteCron only uses CronTrigger functionality of Quartz, which is more useful than the SimpleTrigger. It lets you have a job-firing schedule that recurs based on calendar type scenarios rather than on the exactly specified intervals of SimpleTrigger. The interval based jobs can be run using Sitecore agents.

CronTrigger lets you fire jobs based on schedules such as:

Fire job every friday at 9PM
Fire job every day at 8AM from monday to thursday
Fire job every 3 minutes from 2PM to 4PM
Fire job at 3 pm on monday and wednesday

Module installation is simple using the package installation in the Sitecore admin. Once the module is installed it gets initialized via the Initialize pipeline.

Each time a job is saved or deleted, SiteCron reloads all schedules for consistency. There are OnSaved and OnDeleted events implemented to take care of this.

The implementation of the CronTrigger is done using the code below:


    IJobDetail jobDetail = JobBuilder.Create(jobType).Build();

    ITrigger trigger = TriggerBuilder.Create()
        .WithIdentity(i.Name)
        .WithCronSchedule(i[cronExpressionField])
        .ForJob(jobDetail)
        .Build();
    scheduler.ScheduleJob(jobDetail, trigger);

Here is an example of the IJob implementation:

using Quartz;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;

namespace Sitecron.Samples
{
    public class SampleLogJob : IJob
    {
        public void Execute(IJobExecutionContext context)
        {
            Log.Info("Sample Log Job - Add Log Entry.", this);
        }
    }
}

The module has a check for Publishing.PublishingInstance setting, this is mainly used when Scalability settings are enabled. If you are in a multi-server environment, we want the scheduler to trigger only on the primary designated server. This setting will ensure that the check to validate the current instance to the publishing instance is verified.

Here are the steps to implement a job for SiteCron:

Add a reference to Quartz.dll in your project
Implement a new class which implements Quartz.IJob
Build and deploy to the Sitecore folder
Login to Sitecore admin and go to /sitecore/system/Modules/Sitecron
Add a new SiteCron job
Set the Type to Class Namespace, Assembly
Set the Cron Expression for the schedule and save

I plan on using this for Scheduled site publishes at specific times during the day to avoid peak traffic.

For more information on CronTriggers please visit the following urls:
http://www.quartz-scheduler.net/documentation/quartz-2.x/tutorial/crontriggers.html

For help with Cron Expressions you can use http://www.cronmaker.com/

Expressions
0 15 10 * * ? Fire at 10:15am every day
0 15 20 * * ? * Fire at 10:15pm (20:15) every day
0 15 10 * * ? 2015 Fire at 10:15am every day during the year 2015
0 15 10 ? * MON-FRI Fire at 10:15am every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday
0 15 10 15 * ? Fire at 10:15am on the 15th day of every month
0 15 10 L * ? Fire at 10:15am on the last day of every month
0 0 12 1/5 * ? Fire at 12pm (noon) every 5 days every month, starting on the first day of the month.

It’s alive!! SiteCron published on the Sitecore marketplace! https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecron.aspx?sc_lang=en

If you have any questions or comments, please be sure to reach out.

A different road to Sitecore 8 Upgrade - The final chapter: Presentation!

Akshay Sura — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

This post rounds out the series with presentation magic! Following my hypothetical 😉 theme, the next challenge is to somehow translate the presentation from webforms to MVC. Along with moving content, we would also have to set the presentation of these items.

I know that in my hypothetical situation, I have made it a bit more difficult by not only upgrading to Sitecore 8 but also moving from webforms to MVC. Life would be easier if I just stayed with webforms!!! Nope!

I am glad in this situation I decided to go with Sitecore MVC. Was it the right decision, absolutely! Was it easy, absolutely not!

With the final solution it makes it feasible to have an infrastructure which forces re-usability and test-ability. No complaints about that.

Now back to presentation. The first thing you need to do is to keep a tally of the sublayouts to views translations in a spreadsheet. There might be cases where you have consolidate multiple sublayouts into one view or the other way round. You might also have a need for one sublayout to be replaced by multiple views.

In my case, I went with this simple assumption: For a specific kind of presentable item, the standard values presentation on that template should match the functionality in the webforms solution and the MVC solution. Both the standard values presentation (in webforms and MVC) might not match in terms of the number of presentation items but they will match in what they render.

Once that simple rule is set in stone (well for the most part, there will always be exceptions, right?), the rest should be achievable by scripts.

I am not an MVC guru by any means and I feel that in technology its not what you know its how you learn it!. I pride myself in picking up technology as I work, as do a lot of Sitecore folks I know!

For scripting I always use Sitecore PowerShell. I love using PowerShell commandlets and rolling out libraries in solutions to get complicated tasks done and have a repeatable process.

In this scenario we are going to do the following:

Traverse through the current content tree ( you define what to go through, but typically be sitecore\content\home)
1. For each item we look to see if there is presentation on the standard values, if so we save it
2. We do a diff of the standard values and the item in questions and store the diff
3. At the end of this process, we should have an items.xml (diff’ed presentation for each item) and a standardvalues.xml
Take these XML definitions and transfer them to the new site
Build an xml file called presentationdefinitions.xml which has the translation from sublayouts to views
At this point the assumption is that you have set the standard values on the new Sitecore 8 instance, so that template items have base UI
Traverse through the new content tree (this would be the same since we are importing content package from current Sitecore 6.5+)
1. While traversing the tree which should be the same as the current tree, we reset presentation
2. Look up the item in the items.xml from the current content site, find the translated presentation
3. Set the current item with the diff’ed and translated (sublayouts to views) presentation items
Publish and enjoy!

Current PowerShell Commandlet in Sitecore 6.5+
The commandlet which I have in the Sitecore 6.5+ solution shown below. The main purpose is to catalog standard values, use the standard values to get diff’s on item presentation and also keep tabs of unique sublayouts used across the current 6.5+ website.

    [Cmdlet("Store", "Presentation")]
    public class PresentationCommandlet : BaseCommand
    {
        [Parameter]
        public string PassID { get; set; }

        XDocument docStandardValues = new XDocument(new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "yes"), new XElement("templates"));
        XDocument docItems = new XDocument(new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "yes"), new XElement("items"));
        XDocument docUniqueRenderings = new XDocument(new XDeclaration("1.0", "utf-8", "yes"), new XElement("renderings"));

        protected override void ProcessRecord()
        {
            //get the master database
            Sitecore.Data.Database master = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master");
            var selectItem = master.GetItem(new ID(PassID));
            if (selectItem != null)
            {
                LoopForChildren(selectItem);
            }

            docStandardValues.Save(@"D:\inetpub\Sitecore\Website\temp\xml\StandardValues.xml");
            docItems.Save(@"D:\inetpub\Sitecore\Website\temp\xml\Items.xml");
            docUniqueRenderings.Save(@"D:\inetpub\Sitecore\Website\temp\xml\UniqueRenderings.xml");
        }

        private XElement StoreStandardValuesPresentation(TemplateItem template)
        {
            XElement svaluesNode = new XElement("temp");
            Item standardValues = template.StandardValues;

            if (!IsStandardValuesLoaded(template.ID.ToString(), ref svaluesNode) && standardValues != null)
            {
                svaluesNode = new XElement("template", new XAttribute("id", template.ID.ToString()), new XAttribute("nm", template.Name));

                string rawLayout = Sitecore.Data.Fields.LayoutField.GetFieldValue(standardValues.Fields[Sitecore.FieldIDs.LayoutField]);
                Sitecore.Layouts.LayoutDefinition layout = Sitecore.Layouts.LayoutDefinition.Parse(rawLayout);

                for (int i = 0; i < layout.Devices.Count; i++)
                {
                    Sitecore.Layouts.DeviceDefinition device = layout.Devices[i] as Sitecore.Layouts.DeviceDefinition;

                    if (device != null)
                    {
                        for (int j = 0; j < device.Renderings.Count; j++)
                        {
                            Sitecore.Layouts.RenderingDefinition rendering = device.Renderings[j] as Sitecore.Layouts.RenderingDefinition;

                            if (rendering != null)
                            {
                                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(rendering.ItemID))
                                {
                                    Database master = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master");

                                    Item renderingItem = master.GetItem(rendering.ItemID);

                                    string dataSource = string.IsNullOrEmpty(rendering.Datasource) ? "" : rendering.Datasource;

                                    XElement rNode = new XElement("r", new XAttribute("nm", renderingItem.DisplayName)
                                        , new XAttribute("ph", rendering.Placeholder), new XAttribute("id", rendering.ItemID), new XAttribute("ds", dataSource));

                                    svaluesNode.Add(rNode);
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }

                docStandardValues.Element("templates").Add(svaluesNode);
            }

            return svaluesNode;
        }

        private void StoreItemPresentation(Item itm, XElement svNode)
        {
            if (itm != null)
            {
                XElement itmNode = new XElement("item", new XAttribute("id", itm.ID.ToString()), new XAttribute("nm", itm.Name));

                string rawLayout = Sitecore.Data.Fields.LayoutField.GetFieldValue(itm.Fields[Sitecore.FieldIDs.LayoutField]);
                Sitecore.Layouts.LayoutDefinition layout = Sitecore.Layouts.LayoutDefinition.Parse(rawLayout);

                for (int i = 0; i < layout.Devices.Count; i++)
                {
                    Sitecore.Layouts.DeviceDefinition device = layout.Devices[i] as Sitecore.Layouts.DeviceDefinition;

                    if (device != null)
                    {
                        for (int j = 0; j < device.Renderings.Count; j++)
                        {
                            Sitecore.Layouts.RenderingDefinition rendering = device.Renderings[j] as Sitecore.Layouts.RenderingDefinition;

                            if (rendering != null)
                            {
                                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(rendering.ItemID))
                                {
                                    Database master = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase("master");

                                    Item renderingItem = master.GetItem(rendering.ItemID);

                                    string dataSource = string.IsNullOrEmpty(rendering.Datasource) ? "" : rendering.Datasource;

                                    //check if there are rendering which match the standard values exactly, if they donot record them
                                    //we are only worried about one device, the default device, you can extend it further for all devices and versions
                                    var svItems = (from t in svNode.Descendants("r")
                                                   where t.Attribute("ph").Value == rendering.Placeholder
                                                    && t.Attribute("id").Value == rendering.ItemID
                                                    && t.Attribute("ds").Value == dataSource
                                                   select t).ToList();

                                    if (svItems != null && svItems.Count() == 0)
                                    {
                                        StoreUniquePresentationDetails(renderingItem.DisplayName, rendering.ItemID);

                                        try
                                        {
                                            //depending on your situation, you would want to do before j-1 or after j+1 so that you get the right placement
                                            Sitecore.Layouts.RenderingDefinition nextRendering = device.Renderings[j - 1] as Sitecore.Layouts.RenderingDefinition;
                                            string nextDataSource = string.IsNullOrEmpty(nextRendering.Datasource) ? "" : nextRendering.Datasource;
                                            Item nextRenderingItem = master.GetItem(nextRendering.ItemID);

                                            XElement rNode = new XElement("r", new XAttribute("nm", renderingItem.DisplayName)
                                            , new XAttribute("ph", rendering.Placeholder), new XAttribute("id", rendering.ItemID), new XAttribute("ds", dataSource),
                                                new XElement("aftr", new XAttribute("nm", nextRenderingItem.DisplayName)
                                            , new XAttribute("ph", nextRendering.Placeholder), new XAttribute("id", nextRendering.ItemID), new XAttribute("ds", nextDataSource)));

                                            itmNode.Add(rNode);
                                        }
                                        catch
                                        {
                                            XElement rNode = new XElement("r", new XAttribute("nm", renderingItem.DisplayName)
                                                , new XAttribute("ph", rendering.Placeholder), new XAttribute("id", rendering.ItemID), new XAttribute("ds", dataSource));

                                            itmNode.Add(rNode);
                                        }
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }

                docItems.Element("items").Add(itmNode);
            }
        }

        private void StoreUniquePresentationDetails(string renderingName, string renderingID)
        {
            var items = (from t in docUniqueRenderings.Descendants("r")
                         where t.Attribute("id").Value == renderingID
                select t).ToList();

            if (items != null && items.Count() == 0)
            {
                XElement itmNode = new XElement("r", new XAttribute("id", renderingID), new XAttribute("nm", renderingName));
                docUniqueRenderings.Element("renderings").Add(itmNode);
            }
        }


        private bool IsStandardValuesLoaded(string templateID, ref XElement svNode)
        {
            var svItems = (from t in docStandardValues.Descendants("template")
                          where t.Attribute("id").Value == templateID
                          select t).ToList();

            if (svItems != null && svItems.Count() == 1)
                svNode = svItems.FirstOrDefault();

            return (svItems!= null && svItems.Count() == 1);
        }

        private void LoopForChildren(Item itm)
        {
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(itm[Sitecore.FieldIDs.LayoutField]))
            {
                XElement svNode = StoreStandardValuesPresentation(itm.Template); //get svNode if not recorded, create and get it

                //get the standard values node
                //look at the current item's layout details
                //ignore whats in the standard values
                //add whats not in the standard values

                StoreItemPresentation(itm, svNode);
            }

            //Iterate though children
            Sitecore.Collections.ChildList childList = itm.Children;
            foreach (Item child in childList)
            {
                LoopForChildren(child);
            }
        }

    }

This commandlet produced the following sample outputs.

Items.xml

UniqueRenderings.xml

StandardValues.xml