Following my blog post from earlier this week where I showed how to make SignalR work in Sitecore SPEAK, I thought of another solution to the same issue which is much more streamlined with SPEAK. The issue which I hacked my way through was that the RequireJS implementation in SPEAK requires that a JavaScript file ends with .js if it does not then .js will be added automatically. ...
Sitecore 7 comes with it’s new Content Search API. The title of this post is self explanatory for what i’m about to share. Scenario I assume I have a website that contains information about different publishers books. These books are imported into Sitecore in XML format. I assume that on the website a user should be able to find content from these documents by performing a search. So I want to create an index that will index the contents of these books. Later I want to perform searches on Authors, Book names, Publishers, and clear text. A possibility is to index the pages of the books separately, so when the results are returned you know not only the book where the specific word or phrase has been found but also the exact page. ...
Following this great post by my colleague Alan I came up with an idea on how to improve the SPEAK pipelines concept. The main problem with the pipelines as they are in Sitecore 7.1 is that there is no way to add or remove processors without making changes in JavaScript code. You can’t even change the order in which they are added without changing their priority in code (see Alan’s blog post). ...
The ListControl in SPEAK is made as a generic control for showing lists. Data is fed into the list using a datasource component as shown in my previous post here. In this post I will show how to define the columns in a ListControl and setup the rendering on a SPEAK page. It is kind of similar to how it was done in the “old” version of SPEAK which has been used for ECM 2 (as one of the only concepts which has been kept in the new version). ...
In SPEAK a list is fed with data through a data source. For example to get data into a ListControl the Items rendering parameter on the ListControl has to be bound to a collection on a datasource. When the items model attribute changes, that is when the datasource changes, then the ListControl automatically refreshes and shows the new data. SPEAK ships with 3 different data sources which are all made for Sitecore items. ...
During the Sitecore Hackathon we decided to implement a chat app for Sitecore editors so it is possible to send text messages to other online editors. To do this we wanted to use SignalR and SPEAK for the UI part. Setting up SignalR and creating the SPEAK layout was done quickly but it quickly became obvious that using the two together could be trickier than anticipated. The issue was not with SPEAK itself or SignalR but with RequireJS and the order in which Javascript is loaded. ...
This is just another quick tip about the Sitecore API and this one has been around forever but I rarely see it used. I use it quite often myself when I perform URL or path manipulations so now I want to spread the knowledge so others can benefit from this helping class as well. It is a class called StringUtil which, as the name implies, contain various methods that does something useful with strings. ...
This post is not only about Sitecore development it is valid for any code written in almost any language. It is about making code easier to read. The post is somewhat subjective but I hope that all developers with an IQ higher than 80 will agree. Back in the days when I learned to write code I could end up writing something like this: public void SomeMethod(string args) { if (args != null) var something = args.Something; if (something != null) { var someResult = DoSomethingWithSomething(something); if (someResult != null) { IGotMyResult(someResult); } } } But what I was doing back then was actually turning things upside down, writing “stay with me” instead of saying no right away, making the code less readable for other developers. ...
Just a quick tip for profiling your custom code in Sitecore. Over the years I have seen many different approaches used for measuring and logging the time it takes to execute a block of code. Many of these quite unnecessary since Sitecore already has this functionality built in. Sitecore has a lot of very useful methods for this in the Sitecore.Diagnostics namespace which unfortunately I seldom see used by partners. ...
When working on an old Sitecore solution the log files are almost always completely spammed with different threshold warnings. 744 10:28:14 WARN Item threshold exceeded for web page. Items accessed: 2578. Threshold: 2000. Page URL: /xxxx.aspx 7672 10:28:15 WARN Item threshold exceeded for web page. Items accessed: 29145. Threshold: 2000. Page URL:xxxx.aspx 7672 10:28:15 WARN Memory threshold exceeded for web page. Memory used: 37813KB. Threshold: 35000KB. Page URL:xxxx.aspx This is of course if you have not changed the threshold warning limits in configuration or turned off the threshold warnings completely which is only possible from version 6.4. ...