SPEAK 2.0 Part 2 - Page Layouts

Sitecore provides three layouts to create SPEAK applications. You can find these layouts in core database at this location  /sitecore/client/Speak/Layouts/Layouts

NOTE: All examples and screenshots are taken from Sitecore 9.3 initial release

SPEAK 2.0 Part 1 - Introduction

Greetings Reader!!

This is the first blog in the SPEAK 2.0 series. In this blog, we will understand what is SPEAK, what it is built with and what it offers to Sitecore developers.

What is SPEAK?

SPEAK is an acronym for "Sitecore Process Enablement and Accelerator Kit". Sitecore provides a library of SPEAK compatible components, visual layouts, and styles that developers need in order to implement applications.

SPEAK uses latest browsers standards and HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript libraries like Require JS to build the interface for the controls

GetItem method returns null when Item Name is like GUID

Recently, we upgraded our CMS to Sitecore XP 8.2 Initial Release, we started facing weird issue. The fonts where not loading on pages. When we started digging the issue, we found a pattern. The issue was not for all font files but only for those having GUID like names

E.g. 054c9659-429a-4553-b54e-7db2eedb542a.woff2

So, we tried to reproduce and debug the same in local and we came to know that while trying to get item by using GetItem(string path) method, it returns null.

Then we tried to replicate the same in clean sitecore installation. We created an Item under /sitecore/content/Home/ and named it 054c9659-429a-4553-b54e-7db2eedb542a

Sitecore Cache Manager Tool

Sitecore provides very powerful caching mechanism. Mainly there are three types of cache layers, Items cache, Data cache and Prefetch cache.

Other than above caches, there are many other different caches sitecore maintains in memory. And the number dramatically increases if you have multisite instances.

Read more about sitecore caches in detail: http://sitecoreblog.patelyogesh.in/2013/06/how-sitecore-caching-work.html

Caching issues on CD servers after publishing is common when you are dealing with horizontally scaled Sitecore environment and we were no exception. Recently, we started facing this issue frequently.

Meanwhile you are troubleshooting the caching issue as it might not be a task of a day or two - sometimes you may have to wait for weeks for it to reproduce and collect all relevant data - Cache Manager tool is must have tool for all Sitecore developers dealing with large instances.

Sitecore provides a nice caching tool, Cache.aspx,  in built. (you may find it at /sitecore/admin/cache.aspx) this tool is helpful when you are dealing with small instances of sitecore where your entire cache size is not more than 500 MB, because this tool has a button to clear ALL the caches on a single hit.

Sitecore: Add Custom Standard Values Tokens

Sitecore provides below seven out-of-the-box standard values tokens

    $name: The name for the new item entered by the user
    $id: The ID of the new item
    $parentid: The ID of the parent of the new item
    $parentname: The name of the parent of the new item
    $date: The system date in yyyyMMdd format
    $time: The system time in HHmmss format
    $now: The system date and time in yyyyMMddTHHmmss format

Although in most cases you may fulfill your requirements using above tokens, but sometimes, you may need to create additional tokens.

For example, showing user full name who created the item.

This can simply be done by extending Sitecore's master variable replacer class,  Sitecore.Data.MasterVariablesReplacer

Sitecore Integrated Icon Finder Module

If you are working on Sitecore then you must be aware that setting a proper contextual icon for a content item is usually a good practice as it helps content authors as well as developers to easily identify the context of an item or the purpose the page is created for.

Sitecore provides a rich set of icons in built. There are around a thousand icons we can search from, to select a contextual icon for an item. But there is no search feature available out of the box, so selecting a right icon seems very tedious process sometimes.

Register/Deregister EC2 Servers under ELB using AWS .NET Toolkit

I have been working with AWS toolkit for some time in last week. I prepared some tools to automate our infra team tasks and for our internal development and testing purpose.

Here I will show you how to register/de-register EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancer programmatically using AWS .NET toolkit.

First get your awsSecretAccessKey and awsAccessKey,

1 2	string awsSecretAccessKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["awsSecretAccessKey"]; string awsAccessKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["awsAccessKey"];

Note: The user account you use here for Secret Key and Access Key must have full access to EC2 service of AWS

Create EC2 Client,

1	var client = AWSClientFactory.CreateAmazonElasticLoadBalancingClient(awsAccessKey, awsSecretAccessKey, RegionEndpoint.USWest2);

Make sure you specify correct RegionEndPoint where your EC2 instances exist. Here I have used USWest2 region end point.