Category: CMS

DEF – Pipeline batch ribbon button issue


This is going to be a short blog for fixing issue I came across while working on custom pipeline creation and execution for Sitecore’s Data Exchange Framework(DEF or DxF).

The issue

While the Pipeline Batch item is selected, buttons on DATA EXCHANGE toolbar at top does not behave how they should.

Immediately after selecting pipeline item, I noticed all buttons in ribbon is visible and clickable. Secondly, clicking on Run Pipeline Batch Button does not works. I was neither starting execution of pipeline nor displaying any visible error messages. See below image for more details:

The fix

I started investigation and collecting events what could have done the damage. Found that before last deployment it was behaving the way it should be. Huuummm… that’s good hint, isn’t it? The last release just deployed files to CMS server. This is soothing to my ears as investment scope is drastically reduced to files. The content automatically gone out of equation.

To fix this, I tried install DEF SDK package first with just deploying file artifacts and skipping any content installation.

Unfortunately, that does not work ….!!! 😦

Next best bet is obvious and try to re-install the DEF framework package with deploying files only.

And that does the trick ….!!!! (Dance)

Update:

The file \App_Config\Sitecore\DataExchange\Sitecore.DataExchange.Local.config was missing. Placing this file from Package has actually fixed the issue.

Happy Data Sync and import using Sitecore Data Exchange Framework. 🙂

Sitecore CMS not showing graph on Launch pad


This morning when I login to one of none production environment I found that the graph was not loading on Sitecore CMS launch pad.

When I did into more details and found out the ajax request to get the data are failing with server error(HTTP-500). As shown in below image the response of the API call does not providing any information or clue.

Immediately, I jumped onto logs and found following entry in there.

 The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.

The full exception looks like below.

50616 09:48:50 ERROR [Experience Analytics]: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.
   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
   at Sitecore.Xdb.Reporting.Datasources.Remote.RemoteReportDataSourceProxy.GetData(ReportDataQuery query)
   at Sitecore.Xdb.Reporting.ReportDataProvider.c__DisplayClass18_0.b__1()
   at Sitecore.Xdb.Reporting.ReportDataProvider.GetCachedDataForQuery(ReportDataQuery query, Func`1 ifNotAvailableInCache, Nullable`1 ifModifiedSince)
   at Sitecore.Xdb.Reporting.ReportDataProvider.ExecuteQueryWithCache(ReportDataQuery query, ReportDataSource dataSource, CachingPolicy cachingPolicy)
   at Sitecore.Xdb.Reporting.ReportDataProvider.GetData(String dataSourceName, ReportDataQuery query, CachingPolicy cachingPolicy)
   at Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ReportDataService.ExecuteQuery(IReportQueryData queryData, CachingPolicy cachingPolicy)
   at Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ReportingService.RunQuery(ReportQuery reportQuery)
   at Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Api.Http.AnalyticsDataController.Get(ReportQuery reportQuery)

Fix

After further investigation found out the Reporting keys were not aligned between CM and Reporting server in the ConnectionStrings.config file.

<add name="reporting.apikey" connectionString="84090dc97055b10532a054da067df368" />

Further reading

Sitecore Publishing Service – Part 2 – Install and Configure Module


Now that Publishing service is deployed, configure and up in Part – 1, the next bit is to install and configure Sitecore publishing service module in Sitecore CM and CD. This part is very simple and strait forward. So lets get started…

The Sitecore publishing module is nothing but Sitecore package and needs to be installed the same way as other Sitecore packages. This package contains all the necessary artifacts for this module to perform it’s job.

Download

The Sitecore Publishing Module can be downloaded from here.

Note

Just check the the version compatibility with Sitecore version where you wanted to implement this publishing service/module. For this you need to navigate to individual release page and check the compatibility detail at start of the page under the main heading.

Install publishing module

To install Sitecore publishing module, one can use OOTB Sitecore installation wizard.

==========================================================
***Important! Copy and save this information***
==========================================================
    BEFORE YOU CLICK NEXT:
    - Ensure you have installed and configured the Sitecore Publishing Service (this module only enables integration with the service)
        Documentation detailing how to install the service is available seperately.

        [Warning] This module will not work without a properly configured service instance.  No items will be able to be published.
    
    AFTER YOU CLOSE THE WIZARD:
    After the package is installed, follow these steps to complete the Sitecore Publishing Module installation:
    - Configure the service endpoints:
        Add a configuration file which overrides the 'PublishingServiceUrlRoot' setting to point to your service module        
        Make sure the address contains a trailing slash
        e.g.
            <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
            <configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
              <sitecore>
                <settings>
                  <setting name="PublishingServiceUrlRoot">http://sitecore.publishing/</setting>
                </settings>    
              </sitecore>
            </configuration>
    - Configure the Content Delivery Servers:
        Ensure that the following file is in the website 'App_Config/Modules/PublishingService' directory:
            * Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Delivery.config
        Ensure that the following files exist in the website 'bin' directory:
            * Sitecore.Publishing.Service.dll
            * Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Abstractions.dll
            * Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Delivery.dll

Note

Just before installation process starts, installer will prompt the information about configurations and artifacts needed for the Sitecore Module and services to work. As instructed, copy and save that instruction shown in above(From version 3.1.3).

Configure

Once installation of the module is successful, in CM perform following steps:

For CM

For example:

http://my-sitecore-publishing-service.azurewebsites.net/

Note

Make sure the URL is post-fix with forward slash(/) at the end.

For CD

  • Navigate to <website root>/App_Config/Modules/PublishingService folder in both the CM and CD app services
  • Copy Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Delivery.config file from CM to above folder in CD
  • Navigate to <website root>/bin folder in both the CM and CD app services
  • Copy below library files to CD’s bin folder from CM
    • Sitecore.Publishing.Service.dll
    • Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Abstractions.dll
    • Sitecore.Publishing.Service.Delivery.dll

At this point, the publishing will start working, if there is only one default Internet publishing target is there. The Publishing Module has overwritten few of Sitecore default settings for publishing. So after installation of publishing module, one may notice change in UI for the Publishing. Please read here for more details about visual changes and changes in types of publishing.

The last part -3 will cover some specific configuration for Azure PaaS environment and some advance setting of Sitecore Publishing Service. So stay tuned and enjoy content publishing….!!!

Content sync with RAZL script


Hi Sitecore Enthusiastic,

Recently come across very great strategy to sync content between two instances of Sitecore using a very powerful tool called Razl form Hedgehog.

Please read more about Razl here.

I have used this tool before mainly to compare the content between two different databases. For example production CM and Pre-production CM. Today, I came across very new and great features with latest version of Razl offering call tasks and executing task using Razl scripts.

It is offering content sync tasks to be exported in a file(or call script) as xml format and later one can use that to sync data in different environment using Razal script.

For more information about Razl task, read official document here.

The great part of this task is you can cherry pick what you want to sync out of the whole Sitecore content tree. You can go deep up to the field level with your sync task.

once you have a list of tasks ready, you simple can export that as script and execute it with command or create scheduler task to run that script using command and it will do the sync between source and target connections.

Razl.exe /script:Migrate.xml
Razl.exe /script:"c:\Site Migration\Razl.xml"

Even if you want to go one level further you can automate this sync task post publishing(perhaps not ideal, if frequent publishing is happening) or you can hook it post deploy task in you CD script(if your build contains TDS/unicorn content items).

You must be wondering this is great tool and great way to sync, but what if I am trying to sync big chunk of content items!!!???.
You can use another great feature of Razl called Lightening Mode(obviously you can configure this in you script as well). This mode really boost the performance of sync script if your CoplyAll task is configured to do bulk copying of items.

As far as logging concern, Razl Script mode will output actions as they happen to the command prompt, this output can be written to a text file if required using following command sample.

Razl.exe /script:"c:\Site Migration\Razl.xml" >> c:\logs\RazlScriptLogs.txt

Tip: Single arrow > will create the file if missing and if exist, overwrite the content of file.
Double  arrow >> will create the file if missing and if exist, it will append to the file.

If a log folder has been already configured in the Razl GUI than Script mode will also write to the log file under configured log folder.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Content Sync…!!!

Reference
Script – https://hedgehogdevelopment.github.io/razl/script.html
Connections – https://hedgehogdevelopment.github.io/razl/connections.html
Lightning mode – https://hedgehogdevelopment.github.io/razl/comparing.html#lightning-mode

Set dynamic datasource for template field in Sitecore multi-site


This is to share some of the tricks you can use while dealing with multi-sites with Sitecore CMS while designing content solutions.

While dealing with multi-site, we all come across scenario where we want data of some fields to be different per site based on where that item exist. In other words, want to load dynamic data in link types of fields for the data present in that local site.

Of course, the answer is use Sitecore query instead of fixed path. The trick I wanted to share is how to formulate that query.

Lets take one example(I feel if you explain with real life example, people are tend to understand more quickly).

My multi-site content information structure is laid out as follow:

Content

SiteA

Home (All the navigable pages goes here)

Configuration (Master settings for site and features)

Data Library (As name suggested this holds data for the site)

SiteB

Home

Configuration

Data Library

Now, lets assume you have SiteA for Asia-Pacific and SiteB for Europe and there are country data items present under Data Library for both respected sites as shown in picture below.

multi-site-information-structure

Now, you want content editor to select only countries present under that site in field called “Supported Countries” for site’s Configuration item.

sitea-configuration-for-country-items-as-datasource

You can have following Sitecore query as Source of field Supported Countries for the Site Configuration template.

query:./ancestor::*[@@templateid='{B8313310-198B-4596-9532-7E39BAB33503}']/Data Library/*[@@templateid='{7CF67E0D-A30F-4C48-9247-69DE07821520}']/*

Let’s dive in details about how this query is formulated. Before doing that, please thoroughly go through image below.

sc-query-explained

The query is divided in the six parts:

  • Part 1: first part is query keyword, which informs Sitecore that the data source of this field is not just simple item path but complex Sitecore query.
  • Part 2: The the .(dot) present the current item. These items are highlighted in Red. In our example, it is Configuration item. As we are setting query for the field Supported Countries of template Site Configuration. Configuration item under SiteA and SiteB is actual instance of template.
  • Part 3: This is the tricky part, form current item we are getting the list of all the ancestor items. For Configuration item under SiteA, the ancestors are SiteA, Content and Sitecore. For SiteB, ancestors to Configuration items are SiteB, Content and Sitecore. These items are highlighted in violet color. Once we get the list of ancestors, we need to filter out the item which is of template type Site(id of this template is {B8313310-198B-4596-9532-7E39BAB33503}.
  • Part 4: From Filtered Site item, we need to dive in the the sub-tree of Library. To do this we can use the same method of filtering based on template id like we did in part 3 above, but this would be bit costly operation as we need to look for all children underneath site and then filter based on Site Data Library template. Here, I have used fixed path instead, assuming all the sites in this content tree have to have a item called “Data Library”. This is to demonstrate, one can use fixed path query as well with Sitecore query. These are highlighted in green color in content tree.
  • Part 5: The 5th part is same as part 3, except looking for ancestors, it is looking for children and then filtering the child with the template id {7CF67E0D-A30F-4C48-9247-69DE07821520}. This is to find folder type item of template Country Folder, which are highlighted in Sky-blue color in content tree.
  • Part 6: The last part is to get the list of all items under the Countries folder filtered in part 5 above. Here, I assuming none other item present under this folder except for template type Country. If you are looking for particulate type of items you can use filters to get those items. These items in content tree are highlighted in grey color as leaf nodes.

Tip: Be cautious while using descendant or //* in field’s datasource query. This is costlier read operations and may hit the performance of field rendering in Content editor.

Enjoy dynamic field data source and Sitecore query …!!!

Reference
https://sdn.sitecore.net/Reference/Using%20Sitecore%20Query/Sitecore%20Query%20Syntax.aspx

Content Editor – Create new version automatically on Edit


I came across very nice feature Sitecore CMS is providing out-of-box. This might be very useful strategy while doing the content population/editing.

Here, I am trying to configure Content Management(CM) or say Content Authoring(CA) server to automatically create newer version upon editing the item. This whole exercise can be divide in to two steps :

Step 1: Configure Locking is requited for item editing

To do this, you may need to open the web.config and check below setting’s value is set to “true” on CA server. The default value is true.


<setting name="RequireLockBeforeEditing" value="true" />

 

Step 2: Configure auto-creation of version for item

To get this thing working, default workflow must be assigned to the item for which automatic version creation should be enable while editing. As a start, you can use the default workflow provided by Sitecore /sitecore/system/Workflows/Sample Workflow and if you have required workflow ready you can utilize that. If you planning to utilize sample workflow, please also consider reading my this post.

The best practice is to assign default workflow to template’s standard values. Have a look to below image for more details.

Template Standard Values - Default Workflow

Tip: You may need to switch on the Standard Fields view form View Menu to see Workflow section.

Following code in WorkflowContext class of  Sitecore.Workflows.dll is actually responsible for creating version on editing.


public Item StartEditing(Item item)
{
	Error.AssertObject(item, &amp;quot;item&amp;quot;);
	if (!Settings.RequireLockBeforeEditing || Context.User.IsAdministrator)
	{
		return item;
	}
	if (this._context.IsAdministrator)
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	if (StandardValuesManager.IsStandardValuesHolder(item))
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	if (!this.HasWorkflow(item) &amp;amp;&amp;amp; !this.HasDefaultWorkflow(item))
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	if (!this.IsApproved(item))
	{
		return this.Lock(item);
	}
	Item item2 = item.Versions.AddVersion();
	if (item2 != null)
	{
		return this.Lock(item2);
	}
	return null;
}

All above works for non administrator users. By default, for admin user in Sitecore, they do not need to lock the item to edit so it does not triggers any workflow.

Happy Versioning…!!! 🙂

Ongoing publishing issue with Sitecore 7.2


Here I wanted to share simple solution to an ongoing issue of publishing with Sitecore 7.2 with my company. It is such a simple solution but took lots of efforts and time to get to it. Thought to share it so that if someone is facing same kind of issue, can be benefited out of it.

The problem:

Out marketing team(who is also responsible for the content management) continuously reporting us with the issue of publishing. They mentioned that whenever we try to publish any item, the publishing took lot of time to finish. Most of the time publishing dialog stuck at Initialization stage. This issue sometimes go worst, even after waiting for half an hour to 45 minutes the publishing dialog still shows initialization and we need to ask web admin guys to re-cycle application pool and start publishing again(this is worst case scenario).

Publishing Dialog Initalizing

So as a first step, I asked them to avoid bulky publishing. I also suggested then to avoid using publishing related items rather go to individual items changed and only publish those items. The reason is to minimize items count in publishing which keeps publishing process as short as possible and keep them moving.

Even though content authors follow my suggestions, the issue still persist. So we started investigating even more. We planned to take help of Sitecore support personal who visiting us once every month. He suggested us to compare all the config files with pure vanilla version and along with all the other files and folder so we can be absolute sure we are having all the goodies what should be there. After this huge activity we identified couple of missing files and configurations in both CM and CD environments.

So we have gathered all those missing pieces and deployed to the respected environments.

After this we have reported a side effect from marketing, that what ever we are deploying to Fail-over publishing target(which is our DR cum internal Preview servers) it also eventually published to production(which is very strange to us and this was not the behavior before we deploy the missing bits).

Root cause

So, I started investigating in context to new side effects. While going through the log file for CM server, my eyes struck with an strange log entry which looks something like below.

5768 2016-03-10 11:03:57 INFO AUDIT (ad\paragd): Execute workflow command. Item: master:/sitecore/content/Site1/Home/test, language: en, version: 11, id: {23005A37-6BB5-4025-AC5B-047A8D3F3719}, command: /sitecore/system/Workflows/Site1 Workflow/Draft/Submit, previous state: Draft, next state: /sitecore/system/Workflows/Site1 Workflow/Awaiting Approval, user: ad\paragd
ManagedPoolThread #3 2016-03-10 11:03:59 INFO Starting update of index for the database 'master' (1 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #3 2016-03-10 11:03:59 INFO Update of index for the database 'master' done.
ManagedPoolThread #16 2016-03-10 11:03:59 INFO Starting update of index for the database 'master' (1 pending).
ManagedPoolThread #16 2016-03-10 11:03:59 INFO Update of index for the database 'master' done.
5284 2016-03-10 11:04:00 INFO AUDIT (ad\paragd): Execute workflow command. Item: master:/sitecore/content/Site1/Home/test, language: en, version: 11, id: {23005A37-6BB5-4025-AC5B-047A8D3F3719}, command: /sitecore/system/Workflows/Site1 Workflow/Awaiting Approval/Approve, previous state: Awaiting Approval, next state: /sitecore/system/Workflows/Site1 Workflow/Approved, user: ad\paragd
5284 2016-03-10 11:04:00 INFO AUDIT (ad\paragd): [Publishing]: Starting to process 2 publishing options
4572 2016-03-10 11:04:00 INFO HttpModule is being initialized
568 2016-03-10 11:04:00 INFO HttpModule is being initialized
5456 2016-03-10 11:04:01 INFO Job started: Publish
2736 2016-03-10 11:04:01 INFO Job started: Publish to 'web'
.
.
.
2736 2016-03-10 11:04:01 INFO Job ended: Publish to 'web' (units processed: 11)
7052 2016-03-10 11:04:01 INFO Job started: Publish to 'web_Failover'
.
.
.
7052 2016-03-10 11:04:02 INFO Job ended: Publish to 'web_Failover' (units processed: 11)

Above lines, I found in the log just above the log line for manually triggering of publishing just for the single publishing target which is “fail-Over”.

4392 2016-03-10 11:04:18 INFO AUDIT (ad\paragd): Publish item: master:/sitecore/content/Site1/Home/test, language: en, version: 11, id: {23005A37-6BB5-4025-AC5B-047A8D3F3719}
3600 2016-03-10 11:04:28 INFO AUDIT (ad\paragd): Publish, root: {23005A37-6BB5-4025-AC5B-047A8D3F3719}, languages:en, targets:WWW_Failover, databases:web_Failover, incremental:false, smart:true, republish:false, children:false, related:false
3600 2016-03-10 11:04:28 INFO AUDIT (ad\paragd): [Publishing]: Starting to process 1 publishing options
2864 2016-03-10 11:04:29 INFO Job started: Publish
5240 2016-03-10 11:04:29 INFO Job started: Publish to 'web_Failover'

Solution

From above behavior on the log file, it was clear that the workflow has to do something with this. When I checked the default workflow assigned, I found that there is an auto publishing action configured with final stage of the workflow as shown in below screen grab.

Auto publishing action item configuration

But alone having auto publish action configured, should not be making publishing this slow. So I have investigated more and found the real culprit.

The auto published action is configured with deep=1 as parameters.
So now, I have dive into the de-compiled code and found this is very dangerous parameter configured with auto publishing action.
Having deep parameter set, you are instructing auto publisher to publish everything underneath the selected item(approving item here) to every publishing targets(in this case 2 targets).

So, if you are approving leaf node/item, the auto publishing will be quick as it will only publish that node along with no child. But if you are approving, lets say home node of the site, you are actually publishing not just that root home item but pretty much the whole site to all available publishing targets…!!!(Very shocking…isn’t it?).

So now after approving the item, when you trying to publish that home node to selected target, it always queue up in the publishing queue and Sitecore publishing dialog box show you Initialization message screen as shown above. The item publishing will be picked up when previous auto publishing job is done. This is the case with just one editor, if you have 5-6 content editor, then the situation can go into really worst.

So the easy solution is to remove that auto publishing action item which was publishing lot of unwanted items to all targets in background without any visible signs.

So we did that and everyone is happy ever after…..

But the story does not ended here. I was thinking while going to home that day, when the auto publishing action was configured and present with default workflow since the edges then why approving the item wasn’t picked by both the CD servers?

So next day, I have kept my investigation going and discover the ScalabilitySettings.config file which was missing on all CD servers. While deploying the missing configurations and file we have deployed this file on all CD serves started picking the events execution for all CDs.

So, happy publishing….!!!!

Reference

https://sitecorebasics.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/is-your-sitecore-publishing-stucks/