Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Spending a lot of time developing websites with Sitecore means I've reported my fair share of bugs to support. One particular issue that I came across in 6.6 a while back stands out as my "favourite" issue I've reported – just because the error stops a lot of developers in their tracks thinking "how on earth can this happen?". If you wrote this code, would you think it could crash?
Well it can crash. And to a less experienced developer it can be a very confusing error:
Recently a client of mine came up with some requirements that involved submitting data to the Web Forms for Marketers database via code. Having done a bit of Googling, I came across a Stack Overflow answer on the same subject which seemed to offer a solution. Implementing this code did indeed allow submitting data – however it didn't trigger Save Actions. So while the data will go to the configured WFfM data store, emails or CRM integrations won't get triggered.
That was an issue for my client, who wanted to have email notifications as well. So starting from the Stack Overflow responses, I looked into how the WFfM save actions can be correctly triggered via code.
I was down at Sitecore's offices for a training course the other week and got shown how useful the URIs for Sitecore items can be to your code – something I'd managed to miss before. So in the spirit of sharing, if you've not thought about uses for URIs, have a think about this:
It's a fairly common scenario in Sitecore code: You need to pass details about a specific item between two bits of code, but due to some sort of process boundary you can't pass the specific
Item
object. Given that a specific bit of content in Sitecore is specified by its database, identifier, version and language, how can you pass all that data across a boundary easily?
In my last two posts [first part, second part] I've outlined the results of some research into an approach for how you can package Sitecore with NuGet. I presented this at a recent Sitecore Technical User Group, and am documenting it here with a bit of detail that didn't fit into the presentation. This week I'll finish off the set of posts with a few conclusions from this experiment.
