Web Development – Cooking with Sitecore

Sitecore Publishing Service – Part 1 – Install and Configure Service in Azure PaaS

While working on finding solution for slow publishing issue of more than 10,000 items in Azure PaaS, I came across this very powerful add-on Sitecore Publishing Services.

Believe it or not but once it is installed, configured and up, it reduced the publishing time drastically. In our case, publishing of those 10,000 items were taking around 1 hour 30 mins(hhhuuuffff…), merely took 12 mins to publish.(Super duper awesome, isn’t it…??? This makes everyone’s life easy)

Thus, I decided to write blog on whole solution. Blog will become very lengthy if I put everything in one. Thus decided to split in in three parts. Part 1 will cover installation and basic configuration of publishing service. Part 2 will cover installation of publishing module in CMS. The third part will cover advance configuration of publishing service.

So, lets get started…

Download

You can download both Sitecore publishing service and publishing module from Sitecore’s development site here. It is the designed and developed by Sitecore itself.

Note:
Just check the version compatibility with Sitecore version where you wanted to implement this publishing service/module. see image below for more details. (As I have downloaded first the latest and greatest version 4 at the time I am writing this blog for Sitecore 9.0.1 and later figure out it is not compatible.)

Install publishing service on Azure PaaS

With my current client all their Sitecore implementation is in Azure PaaS. It absolutely makes sense to have this Sitecore Publishing service also setting in Azure PaaS. So, follow below steps to get the publishing services up as app service.

Download the service application as zip file from above link. Select the one which is matching your host architecture type either 32 bit or 64 bit.
Open Kudu – Advance tool for the web app where you want to host publishing service

in Kudu editor open command console by navigate to Debug Console menu option and select CMD
navigate to site root folder using following command

cd site\wwwroot

Drag and drop service zip file to folder view area above console. This will upload the service package to Azure web app.
Once upload completed, run following command on console below the folder view

unzip -o *.zip

Assumption
The site’s wwwroot folder has only one zip file which is recently uploaded publishing service zip file.

Once unzipping of application completed, execute following commands in CMD. This will set connection stings of core, master and web database in publishing service. Going forward, these connection strings will be used for all publishing jobs.

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host configuration setconnectionstring core "<core database connection string>"

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host configuration setconnectionstring master "<master database connection string>"

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host configuration setconnectionstring web "<web database connection string>"

Once connection strings are configured for these databases the next step is to upgrade the database schema to required one for Sitecore publishing service

Sitecore.Framework.Publishing.Host schema upgrade --force

After executing above command the console displays the result of the command. The below screenshot have result with already updates schema for all the databases as I have previously upgraded the schema.

Once above commands are successfully executed, now it is the time to check the status of the publishing service web application.

In the browser open below URL

http://<<azure app service name>>.azurewebsites.net/api/publishing/maintenance/status

Above web api will return following JSON result if all the configurations are correctly set.

{
    "status": 0
}

This are basic steps to deploy Sitecore Publishing services up and running in azure PaaS. In the Part – 2, will cover installation of Sitecore Publishing Module in Sitecore CM/CA with configuration.

Sitecore config patching overridden for Azure…!!!???

Hi Folks,

Recently, I been struck by an issue where my config patches were not reflecting in Test environment. Not to mention, it is working absolutely fine in my local as well as on CI(typical developer’s excuse).

After initial investigation found, it is patching all of the config changes from my custom config patch file but not the particular one where I was overriding the Sitecore’s OOTB logging functionality to log error and fatal to Azure Application Insight(know as AppInsight).

For our deploying artifacts to test environment(which is Azure PAAS), we are using another great tool by Sitecore called Sitecore Azure Module(currently known as Sitecore Azure Toolkit).This is the one which is compatible with Sitecore 8.1. With this in place, my whole focus is shifted to this tools functionality and internal processing.

After thorough investigation of this tool and it’s architecture, I found the root cause of the config not patching issue(or I say config patching overriding issue). The module’s configuration item of template type /sitecore/templates/Azure/Deployment/Azure Deployment has a field call Global WebConfig Patch which has title text as [Do not edit!] – Global Web Config Patch (These are the global web config patches that will always be applied to every deployment). This field holds all the configurations for Sitecore XP to work in Azure PAAS environment.

Sitecore Azure Module Deployment Configuration Item

While we trigger the command to Upgrade Files in Sitecore Azure Module Window, it start packaging all the required files and also configurations. As part of Sitecore configuration packaging, it gets the whole patched output of all config files and after that is applies the config changes mentioned in the Global WebConfig Patch field of the above mentioned template under your Environment/location/Farm/WebRole item of your module configuration. The whole config path is finally written in single Sitecore.config file.

Tip: Be cautious while changing this global setting of Sitecore Azure module. Don’t do it until and unless you are knowing what are you doing.

Happy Deployment…!!!! 🙂

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

Habitat – Profile tracking issue post installation

After installing Habitat for Sitecore on local development environment form https://github.com/HedgehogDevelopment/Habitat/tree/TDS-latest (scroll down for installation instructions), it found that site’s pages gives below error:

Server Error in '/' Application.
Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: source
Description: An unhandled exception occurred.

Exception Details: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: source

Source Error:

Line 64: private IEnumerable GetHistoricalOutcomes()
Line 65: {
Line 66: return this.outcomeManager.GetForEntity(new ID(Tracker.Current.Contact.ContactId));
Line 67: }

The solution is set the value of Xdb.Tracking.Enabled to false in C:\websites\Habitat.dev.local\Website\App_Config\Include\Sitecore.Xdb.config file

Hit the refresh in browser for the habitat page and bang.

Here I am assuming, the local environment is configured as CMS-only mode.

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).

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.

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/

Sitecore Active Directory Configuration: Read User Data from AD Group

The problem:

while working on the Allowing access to the organization’s users as Content Author on the Sitecore CM server using Sitecore’s Active Directory(AD) Module, we encounter very strange issue of not able to read user data from the AD user group. So the idea is to enable group of employees in organization to grant access to the CMS server to do the content authoring duties and enable their windows credential to get access to the Sitecore CMS.

In other words Sitecore’s User Manager wasn’t displaying user from active directory group.

Steps to reproduce issue/problem

Install Sitecore’s Active Directory Module from here.

Configure AD connection string to point to a logical group in the active directory structure.

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="ManagersConnString" connectionString="LDAP://testsrv/OU=Managers,DC=testdomain,DC=sitecore,DC=net" />
</connectionStrings>

Configuring the ASP.NET Security Providers(Membership Provider)

 <add name="ad"
 type="LightLDAP.SitecoreADMembershipProvider"
 connectionStringName="AD"
 applicationName="sitecore"
 minRequiredPasswordLength="1"
 minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"
 requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"
 requiresUniqueEmail="false"
 connectionUsername="[put the username here]"
 connectionPassword="[put the password here]"
 connectionProtection="Secure"
 attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName"
 enableSearchMethods="true" />

Activating Switching Providers

In web.config file, in <system.web> section, browse for <membership> element and find the provider called sitecore and set its realProviderName attribute to switcher.

<membership defaultProvider="sitecore" hashAlgorithmType="SHA1">
    <providers>
        <clear/>
        <add name="sitecore" type="Sitecore.Security.SitecoreMembershipProvider, Sitecore.Kernel" realProviderName="<strong>switcher</strong>" providerWildcard="%" raiseEvents="true"/>
        <add name="sql" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="core" applicationName="sitecore" minRequiredPasswordLength="1" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="256"/>
        <add name="switcher" type="Sitecore.Security.SwitchingMembershipProvider, Sitecore.Kernel" applicationName="sitecore" mappings="switchingProviders/membership"/>
    </providers>
</membership>

Open Sitecore’s User Manager Check the user listed from AD.

Here we are just interesting in getting the users from the Active Directory not the Roles. But you can extent Sitecore Securities to get the roles and the some of the additional User related data using configuring Role Manager and Profile Provider settings.

Root Cause

There are no actual user data present under the AD group. we have checked that, if you change the connection string to the node in the AD tree which contains the actual user under it will work. But if you are trying to point your AD connection to a Logical Group it won’t work.

Solution :
While dealing with the AD most of the time we have great difficulty to see and check what’s the structure and values of element/user properties.
For that I personally recommend the simple ans easy to use tool called “AD Explorer”. It is free and handy tool which gives you the graphical representation of you AD tree and also helps you to find the correct connection string.

It’s free tool and you can download it from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb963907.aspx

Step 1

Change the connection string to point to the parent node of the logical group.

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="ManagersConnString" connectionString="LDAP://testsrv/DC=testdomain,DC=sitecore,DC=net" />
</connectionStrings>

Step 2

In the system.web/membership/providers add the attribute customFilter for the “AD” node as shown in below configuration done in step 2 in reproduction steps above.

<add name="ad"
type="LightLDAP.SitecoreADMembershipProvider"
connectionStringName="AD"
applicationName="sitecore"
minRequiredPasswordLength="1"
minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"
requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"
requiresUniqueEmail="false"
connectionUsername="[put the username here]"
connectionPassword="[put the password here]"
connectionProtection="Secure"
attributeMapUsername="sAMAccountName"
enableSearchMethods="true"
customFilter="(memberOf=CN=Managers,DC=testdomain,DC=sitecore,DC=net)" />

Once it is all done, Open Sitecore’s User Manager and check there are users listed from AD. It would be looks like image below.

Happy Active Directory Configuration 🙂

File download issue with Sitecore MVC and resolution

The problem:

while working on the requirement of downloading calendar item(.ics) for an event on the site, I struck with the below given error.

OutputStream is not available when a custom TextWriter is used.

Steps to reproduce issue/problem

Using Sitecore MVC form to do the form posting

 @using (Html.BeginRouteForm(Sitecore.Mvc.Configuration.MvcSettings.SitecoreRouteName, FormMethod.Post))
 {
     @Html.Sitecore().FormHandler("SeminarWebinarEvent", "DownloadCalendar")
     @Html.Hidden("eventId", @eventObj.Id.ToString())
     &lt;button type="submit"&gt;Add to Calender&lt;/button&gt;
 }

Controller Post Action

 [HttpPost]
 public ActionResult DownloadCalendar(string eventId)
 {
     var eventItem = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem(new ID(eventId));
     if (eventItem == null)
     {
         //// TODO : Put the code for the error handling
     }

     //// get file stream
     var fileStream = this.eventService.GetCalendarFileStream(eventItem);
     return File(fileStream , "text/calendar", string.Format("{0}.ics", eventItem.Name));
 }

Finally, Click on the Download link of the rendering on the page.

Root Cause

For the fix and the root cause I took the help of the God (not the real almighty but Google ;-)). I found that because of the basic page architecture of Sitecore, the page rendering has already started before the rendering control action returns the file response.

Solution :

After applying couple of different solutions(every time with fingers crossed), I found below given solution much handy and does the job. The solution is much simple and easy to implement.
In this case we need to split the whole action into two different actions like shown in below steps.

Step 1

Put the logic of creating file stream in one action

 [HttpPost]
 public ActionResult DownloadCalendar(string eventId)
     {
          var eventItem = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem(new ID(eventId));
          if (eventItem == null)
          {
              //// TODO : Put the code for the error handling
          }

          //// read the file stream in the string format
          var fileStream = this.eventService.GetCalendarFileStream(eventItem);
          //// due to limitation of sitecore MVC redirect to the different action which is responsible for actual download
          return RedirectToAction("ActualCalenderDownload", new { fileString = fileStream, fileName = eventItem["Name"] });
        }

Step 2

At the end of the action redirect to another action which is actually responsible for downloading the file.

Step 3

Create the new action which takes the file stream from above action and returns the fileResult

 [HttpGet]
 public ActionResult ActualCalenderDownload(string fileString, string fileName)
 {
      if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(fileString))
      {
          //// TODO : Put the code for the error handling
      }

      return File(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(fileString), "text/calendar", string.Format("{0}.ics", fileName));
 }

Happy Coding 🙂

Sitecore controller rendering action results – what can I return?