It took me a bit to gather my thoughts and get back to normal at the Symposium. I was pretty excited about all the new things presented and can’t wait to start implementing the new stuff.
The Beginning
Not much to report. Got there and registered and met my RBA co-workers for the first time in person and some other fellow Sitecore lovers. It was great to not be on Teams/Zoom and interact. We were all probably thinking I thought you were taller/shorter. Well maybe that was just me. Had a great night at the RBA dinner and then it was back on the train home.
The Sessions
Boarded the train with my new RBA flag and made it in time for the opening. It didn’t disappoint. It was a great way to start things off. Got to take some selfies with co-workers new and old. This year’s them for the Symposium was Meet Every Moment. Nice! Here are some of my favorite sessions.
Things really started moving fast on Wednesday. First got to the Symposium just in time to see Mindy Kaling. I am a big fan and my daughters are too. She had great advice that I passed on to my daughters.
One of the sessions I attended was Building the perfect composable tech stack. Some of the things I learned:
Look at best tech despite what Sitecore owns.
Fit the right stack for the customer.
The tech stack is constantly changing.
Tech stack should be flexible.
I also saw From discovery to live sites: A multisite solution at scale using SXA for Central Garden & Pet. Altudo using their OneWeb solution was able to solve a complex issue of having several multi sites.
Next it was Evaluating legacy to composable: United Airlines’ journey to futureproof development. Love the roadmap of what they came up with and will help knowing what to leave in the past and move forward with.
Of course I got to present with one of my co-workers and my co-workers presented as well.
The party for this year’s Symposium was at the Museum of Science and Industry. I haven’t been there in over 20 years so it was great to see it again.
The MVP Summit
The MVP Summit started with a round table discussion. Got some great insights on E-Learning and CDP. At night we all went to the Punch Bowl. It was great catching up with everyone. We go the inside scoop of a lot things that I can’t share yet.
One of the things I do want to mention is Content Hub One. I am very excited about this new product offering. I think it will be an important piece for new and old clients that want to get their content in the cloud.
The Beanbag Chairs
Well I have been wanting a bean bag chair for a long time. There were tons of them at the Sitecore Symposium. So for my birthday this year I asked for one. It looks nice with my Sitecore pillows and MVP plaque. I think I will keep adding to my collection of pillows.
Final Thoughts
Composable and Cloud are the first words that come to mind when I think of the 2022 Symposium. It comes as no surprise as that is where things are not only going that way for Sitecore, but the IT industry in general. Personalization is probably the best thing you can do to get the most use for your website. With CDP and Personalization it is easier than ever. Hopefully we will see more clients take advantage of that so the can “Meet Every Moment”. The roadmap is there to do everything now it up to us to drive it.
Sitecore CDP formerly Boxever is something you are probably hearing a lot about these days. As a developer you can implement it easily and as a marketer you can take advantage of some of the features as soon as it is implemented. Here are the steps in order I did to get started.
1. Get a sandbox account.
Should be able to get a login for the CDB Sandbox from your Sitecore rep. You can find the sandbox site here. This is a shared sandbox so you will need to be careful not to change anything that someone else has setup. It is ok to look and see what others have setup. That is one advantage of a shared sandbox.
When you first login to your sandbox account you should see a message like this:
2. Get your keys and Create Point of Sale Value.
To get your keys go to the gear icon at the bottom left and select System Settings then API Access.
Copy both keys. Please note in my example I did not use the API Token.
3. Create Point of Sale
Selected System Setting then Point of Sale. Click on the create button and fill out the required fields. In my case since I am using the Lighthouse Demo I called my POS LighthousePOS. Well I can’t remember if I created or it was already out there.
4. Implement code. (SXA Example)
The next step is to implement the script needed to integrate CDP with your site. The script should look like the following. As of this blog the target version should be 1.2 and s.src should be 1.4.8. You will need to add your client key.
// Define the Boxever queue
var _boxeverq = _boxeverq || [];
// Define the Boxever settings
var _boxever_settings = {
client_key: 'client key goes here', // Replace with your client key
target: 'https://api.boxever.com/v1.2', // Replace with your API target endpoint specific to your data center region
cookie_domain: '.lighthouse.localhost', // Replace with the top level cookie domain of the website that is being integrated e.g ".example.com" and not "www.example.com"
pointOfSale: "LighthousePOS",
web_flow_target: "https://d35vb5cccm4xzp.cloudfront.net"
};
// Import the Boxever library asynchronously
(function() {
var s = document.createElement('script'); s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true;
s.src = 'https://d1mj578wat5n4o.cloudfront.net/boxever-1.4.8.min.js';
var x = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; x.parentNode.insertBefore(s, x);
})();
I kept this pretty simple and for now created a script and put it under the Base Themes\Main Theme\Scripts folder. I created a script item called cdp-script.
5. Create an Experiment
From the menu expand Experiments and choose Web. Click on the Create Experiment button.
From there you want to click on the add variant button.
After you click on Add Variant there will be a side menu that will appear. Choose My Library Templates.
We will choose a simple popup takeover.
Change anything you want to. In this case I changed the background and font colors. You can also change HTML and script
Once done, make sure you click on the Save button then Close when you see the checkmark.
You will see the new Popup in a list. Click on the Preview button, enter in your site with the CDP script and click the go button. If everything worked correctly you should see the popup.
Once the site opens, in this case my local demo site you will see the popup created.
Another option to try is Experiences the setup is similar to Experiments. You can find on the same menu as Experiments.
This should get you started. I would take a look at what others have done since it is a public sandbox. There are a lot of possibilities with CDP and we are only scratching the surface. For more information on getting started please take a look at this video that was released as I was putting together this blog.
Recently I did a Lucene to SOLR upgrade. Even though SOLR has been out a while you may still run into instances that you may need to upgrade. This I hope gives you a small guide on some of the things you need to do other than installing the SOLR server.
1. Turn on switch and rebuild on indexes. You can find more information about that here. Don’t forget to add your custom indexes as well.
2. Convert string to string[]. I ran into an issue where a field was coming back with a null. Looking at the SOLR server and doing a query I found that the following would come back as null.
Six years doing the Sitecore Hackathon and one thing I learned is each year brings a new challenge. First off I had a great team. Our team name was R-Bacon-Sulting. I worked with two co-workers from RBA. One being a front-end developer and the other being Devops. All we needed was a project manager and a business analyst to complete the team. We chose the third category for the hackathon which was to make an enhancement to the MVP site.
As hard as we tried the goal of adding to the MVP site did not work out since we had trouble getting the site up and running and ran out of time. We did have a great idea and hope to one day we can implement it.
The bottom line is we all learned something and as co-workers we got to know each other better. In the end isn’t this what this mainly is about?
So here we go with the summary of what I learned this year (in Ted Lasso speak) because let’s face it there is always room for improvement. That is why I love what I do.
Under pressure is when we learn that we really have what it takes. We may be in unfamiliar territory, but we adapt and get better because of it.
So many things happen when you don’t succeed. Life is full of surprises. We just have to go with the flow and hope for the best as we learn. Even if it is not the fairy tale you want it is the fairy tale that is best for you to grow professionally.
Yeah I love to code, but you know what else I love to do? I love to teach people about coding. What you learn is always crucial to pass it on to others. Glad I got the opportunity to pass on some Sitecore things to the team and I also learned things from them.
Everyone that participated in the Hackathon will remember the good and the bad. You know what though, next year we need to be a goldfish and approach it like it is something new and exciting. Forget about what went wrong, but focus on the task at hand.
Special shout out to all that put on the Sitecore Hackathon every year and our team from RBA.
Sitecore commerce has some really great features and hidden gems. Recently I was given an assignment to create some custom forms for the BizFX tools that come with Sitecore commerce. Excited as I was to get started I found there was not too much documentation on this. I had some help thanks to Andrew Sutherlands blog. There were things though that I ran in to that I had to figure out how to get through. So I want to make sure I can help others who may get into the same situation as me and also if I ever need to to extend the tools again I can look back at this blog and it will help me figure some of the things out.
Understanding the Master Form and Children
Basically you have a master view. This is usually a summary of your records. Clicking on that master form will show its children views. The children could be any type of detail block of information. So lets say you have a summary of services as your master. The children view when breaking it down further could be notes and description, service dates, vendor information etc… The code below is an example on how to add children view(s) to a master view. You need to make sure you are on the correct master view.
[PipelineDisplayName(Constants.Blocks.GetServicesItemsBlock)]
public class GetServicesItemsBlock : GetTableViewBlock
{
private readonly IServiceService _servicesService;
public GetServicesItemsBlock(IServiceService servicesService)
{
_servicesService = servicesService;
}
public override Task<EntityView> Run(EntityView entityView, CommercePipelineExecutionContext context)
{
Condition.Requires(entityView).IsNotNull($"{this.Name}: The argument can not be null");
var entityViewArgument = context.CommerceContext.GetObjects<EntityViewArgument>().FirstOrDefault();
if (entityViewArgument == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(entityViewArgument.EntityId)) return Task.FromResult(entityView);
if (!EntityViewExtensions.IsOnServicesView(entityViewArgument)) //Make sure you are on the correct master view
{
return Task.FromResult(entityView);
}
var entityId = long.Parse(entityViewArgument.EntityId.Substring(entityViewArgument.EntityId.LastIndexOf('-') + 1));
var services = _servicesService.GetServiceById(entityId);
EntityView subView = new EntityView
{
EntityId = entityId.ToString(), Name = Constants.Headers.Items, UiHint = "Table"
};
entityView.ChildViews.Add(subView);
var servicesItemList = services.Result.ServiceItems;
if (servicesItemList == null) return Task.FromResult(entityView);
foreach (var subitem in servicesItemList)
{
EntityView lineView = new EntityView
{
EntityId = subView.EntityId, ItemId = services.Result.OrderId, Name = Constants.Headers.Items
};
lineView.AddServiceItemChildView(subitem);
subView.ChildViews.Add(lineView);
}
return Task.FromResult(entityView);
}
}
For the master you will have code like this if you need to change the properties:
//Current entity which is the the master view is passed in to the block.
public override async Task<EntityView> Run(EntityView arg, CommercePipelineExecutionContext context)
var status = entityViewArgument.ViewName.Replace("ServicesList-", string.Empty);
arg.Properties.Add(new ViewProperty
{
Name = "ListName",
RawValue = status,
IsReadOnly = true,
IsHidden = true,
IsRequired = false
});
arg.UiHint = "Table";
Example Summary
To sum it up the master/child view structure is simple. You have your master view, but then you can add children views and those children can have children views.
For the children you want to generate a new view.
It would be done in this order (see code for reference):
Get the master view.
Create a subview (child view).
Create and add children to the subview.
Add subview to the master entity view.
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Sitecore.Commerce.Core;
using Sitecore.Commerce.EntityViews;
using Sitecore.Framework.Conditions;
using Sitecore.Framework.Pipelines;
namespace PSP.Commerce.Plugin.Service.Pipelines.Blocks
{
///<summary>
///displays the service items view in BizFx/services.
///</summary>
[PipelineDisplayName(Constants.Blocks.GetServicesItemsBlock)]
public class GetServicesItemsBlock : GetTableViewBlock
{
private readonly IServiceService _serviceService;
public GetServicessItemsBlock(IServiceService serviceService)
{
_serviceService = serviceService;
}
public override Task<EntityView> Run(EntityView entityView, CommercePipelineExecutionContext context)
{
Condition.Requires(entityView).IsNotNull($"{this.Name}: The argument can not be null");
var entityViewArgument = context.CommerceContext.GetObjects<EntityViewArgument>().FirstOrDefault();
if (entityViewArgument == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(entityViewArgument.EntityId)) return Task.FromResult(entityView);
if (!EntityViewExtensions.IsOnSubcriptionsView(entityViewArgument))
{
return Task.FromResult(entityView);
}
var entityId = long.Parse(entityViewArgument.EntityId.Substring(entityViewArgument.EntityId.LastIndexOf('-') + 1));
var service= _serviceService.GetServiceById(entityId);
EntityView subView = new EntityView
{
EntityId = entityId.ToString(), Name = Constants.Headers.Items, UiHint = "Table"
};
entityView.ChildViews.Add(subView);
var serviceItemList = service.Result.ServiceItems;
if (serviceItemList == null) return Task.FromResult(entityView);
foreach (var subitem in serviceItemList)
{
EntityView lineView = new EntityView
{
EntityId = subView.EntityId, ItemId = service.Result.OrderId, Name = Constants.Headers.Items
};
lineView.AddServiceItemChildView(subitem);
subView.ChildViews.Add(lineView);
}
return Task.FromResult(entityView);
}
}
}
Example child item.
There are many field types you can use for views, but two of them that stood out for me was the EntityLink and HTML field types.
Below is an example of an link type. Which we can create to navigate to other types of views. The Id for instance could be used to retrieve records for the child views.
var idViewProperty = new ViewProperty
{
Name = "Id",
RawValue = service.Id,
IsReadOnly = true,
UiType = "EntityLink"
};
entityView.Properties.Add(idViewProperty);
Below is an example of using a UitType of Html to create an image column value.
Hard to believe this was my fifth year doing the Sitecore Hackathon. It has become a tradition though and would not want to miss it. This year my teammate was a co-worker and we were team Alpha Centauri. Get it? We both work for Alpha Solutions. Anyway here is how it went.
Keep Things Simple
Learned this many times in the past. So anything that wasn’t out of the box was off the table. Nothing wrong with trying something new, but as a marathoner I have to stick to the important rule of not trying anything you haven’t practiced on race day.
Well I Missed Something
So I should of read this more closely. We were supposed to use Sitecore 10.1, but for some reason I installed Sitecore 10 update 1 beforehand. So guess what? I broke my own rule and just learned something new. It was McAvoy vs Stewart. Love the reskin BTW.
Some Great Topics to Choose from, but We Need a Solid Idea
This year was the fastest year my hackathon team came up with an idea. One of the topics was Best of SXA. Working with SXA everyday we had come up with a much needed change we felt is needed.
Divide and Conquer
As in past hackathons that I have worked with others, it is always good to come up with roles on the team. I would handle the documentation/video and my teammate would handle the coding. And we were off.
The Finale
After lots of time spent coding and documenting we put something together. Hardest thing for me was getting the video right. There is a reason why I am not a YouTube star. So this is what we came up with.
A few months back I was given a task to put in basic authentication into Sitecore 9.3. It was mainly from preventing anyone to get into staging sites. I came across and older blog that is currently missing. I wanted to give them credit since it was the inspiration for this blog. You can find the original blog post on the web archives here. I have made some of my own updates including Rules Based Configuration.
using System;
using System.Web;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest;
using System.Text;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using System.Linq;
namespace Abc.SharedSource.SitecoreProcessors
{
public class BasicAuthentication : HttpRequestProcessor
{
private bool CheckPassword(string username, string password)
{
string[] userlist = Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.GetSetting("BasicAuthUsername").Split(',');
string[] passwords = Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.GetSetting("BasicAuthPassword").Split(',');
if(userlist.Contains(username) && passwords.Contains(password))
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
private void AuthenticateUser(string credentials)
{
try
{
var encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1");
credentials = encoding.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(credentials));
int separator = credentials.IndexOf(':');
string name = credentials.Substring(0, separator);
string password = credentials.Substring(separator + 1);
if (!CheckPassword(name, password))
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.StatusCode = 401;
}
}
catch
{
HttpContext.Current.Response.StatusCode = 401;
}
}
//Basic Auth Code End
public override void Process(HttpRequestArgs args)
{
Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");
if (Sitecore.Context.Item != null || Sitecore.Context.Database == null || args.Url.ItemPath.Length == 0)
return;
if (Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.GetSetting("TurnonBasicAuth") != "True" || Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.GetSetting("TurnonBasicAuth") == "") return;
if (PatternMatch()) return;
var request = args.HttpContext.Request;
var authHeader = request.Headers["Authorization"];
if (authHeader != null)
{
var authHeaderVal = AuthenticationHeaderValue.Parse(authHeader);
// RFC 2617 sec 1.2, "scheme" name is case-insensitive
if (authHeaderVal.Scheme.Equals("basic",
StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) &&
authHeaderVal.Parameter != null)
{
AuthenticateUser(authHeaderVal.Parameter);
}
}
else
{
args.HttpContext.Response.StatusCode = 401;
}
if (HttpContext.Current.Response.StatusCode == 401)
{
string Realm = Sitecore.Context.Site.TargetHostName;//HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;
args.HttpContext.Response.Clear();
args.HttpContext.Response.Headers.Add("WWW-Authenticate",
string.Format("Basic realm=\"{0}\"", Realm));
args.HttpContext.Response.Flush();
args.HttpContext.Response.End();
}
}
bool PatternMatch()
{
string[] mockUrls = Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.GetSetting("ExcludedPaths").Split(',');
string url = Sitecore.Context.Site.TargetHostName;// HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri;
foreach (var urlval in mockUrls)
{
var containsurl = url.Contains(urlval);
if(containsurl)
{
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
}
}
Since this is Sitecore 9.3 the configuration below is using rules based. 🙂 More than likely you would want to require the ContentManagement role, but you can modify the configuration to use any roles and environments. I put the username and settings in the configuration since Sitecore will also have its own and in this case is only for preventing anyone who accidently finds the site from seeing anything.
2020 sure has had its changes and challenges. Right now Chicago should be alive with Sitecore fans enjoying the best pizza in the world, but that is not possible this year. I am excited nonetheless to enjoy they symposium in the Chicago suburbs and can’t wait for the next few days.
My goal for this year is to concentrate on content marketing and learn as much as I can about the Sitecore Content Hub. That is something I have been excited to learn more about and can’t wait to dive in.
Things kicked off tonight with Happy Hour. I will let the pictures speak, but there was drink making, a chef and magic. Most of all enthusiasm.
Happy HourMaking DrinksSome great appetizers.Magic!Da Bears! Okay they were not part of the kickoff, but they are playing tonight.
Recently I was given the task to disable the identity login for a dev server. It can be done easily by renaming Sitecore.Owin.Authentication.Disabler.config.example and Sitecore.Owin.Authentication.IdentityServer.Disabler.config.example in the [sitefolder]\App_Config\Include\Examples\ folder. We needed an automated way though. Using the PowerShell script below did the trick.
#SitePhysicalRoot and Prefix are optional. If this script is inserted into a PowerShell install script that has these variables already. In my case XP0-SingleDeveloper.ps1.
#$SitePhysicalRoot = "F:\Sites"
#$Prefix = "testsite123"
$filepath = $SitePhysicalRoot + '\' + $Prefix +'.sc\App_Config\Include\Examples\'
$filelist = @()
$fn1 = 'Sitecore.Owin.Authentication.Disabler.config.example'
$fn2 = 'Sitecore.Owin.Authentication.IdentityServer.Disabler.config.example'
$path1 = $filepath + $fn1
$path2 = $filepath + $fn2
$filelist = @($path1,$path2)
foreach ($file in $filelist) {
If (Test-Path $file){
$rn = $file.replace(".example","")
Rename-Item -Path $file -NewName $rn
Write-Output $file was renamed to $rn
} else {
"{0} does not exist or already renamed" -f $file
}
}
If you are like me, you must play around with a new feature to understand it better. When Rule Based configuration was introduced in Sitecore 9.3 that was the case for me. Now that I understand it better and have used it in a real application, I will explain it so if I ever read this blog again, I will understand it.
Role:Define
Depending on if you are running Sitecore locally or have setup a Content Management and Content Delivery server etc… this value will be different for each environment. In the Sitecore 9.3 you will find the following.
<!-- SUPPORTED SERVER ROLES Specify the roles that you want this server to perform. A server can perform one or more roles. Enter the roles in a comma separated list. The supported roles are: ContentDelivery ContentManagement ContentDelivery, Indexing ContentManagement, Indexing Processing Reporting Standalone Default value: Standalone -->
In this case we will just use the default for our example.
<add key="role:define" value="Standalone"/>
Localenv:Define
This is used to denote the type of local environment installed. For instance, you can have a CM server setup for staging and production. You might then have one value on the CM for staging that says “StageCM” the one on the production CM could be “ProdCM”. This is done so you can break down the configuration settings further. I will go into this more later. In this case we will pretend the role:define value is Standalone and this is a developer’s install. We are going to add the following:
Let’s bring this together. Below is a simple example of how to make sure the configuration looks for the role Standalone and localenv value of DevEnviroment. Notice the xmlns:localenv=http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/localenv/. That is important to tell the process to look for that localenv key and xmlns:role=http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/role/ is used to tell the process to look for the role key. In this example we are doing this for sites, but this can be done for other tags.
You can do many combinations. Keep in mind that you can use logical expressions as well. Like or and !.
<?xml version="1.0"?><configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/"xmlns:localenv="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/localenv/"xmlns:role="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/role/">
<sitecore role:require="Standalone or ContentDelivery">
<sites localenv:require="LocalDeveloper">
//Add your transformation code here. </sites>
<sites localenv:require="DevBuild">
//Add your transformation code here.</sites>
<sites localenv:require="Prod">
//Add your transformation code here. </sites>
<sites localenv:require="Stage">
//Add your transformation code here. </sites>
</sitecore>
<sitecore role:require="ContentManagement">
<sites localenv:require="Prod">
//Add your transformation code here.</sites>
<sites localenv:require="Stage">
//Add your transformation code here. </sites>
</sitecore>
</configuration>
What is a good way to test all this? Well Sitecore has though of that.
Using [siteaddress]/sitecore/admin/showconfiglayers.aspx you can select a role and see what the configuration will look like. The result is similar to what you would see with showconfig.aspx.
One thing I should mention is so far, I have not gotten it to work with a non-Sitecore configuration transform. In those cases, you may still need to use something like SlowCheetah. Let me know if you have any questions.
Check out the links below for more reading on the rule based configurations.