Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
If you missed my session at SUGCON this year, or if you were there but want to go back over something I said, don't worry: The slides and a transcript of what I was saying are available here...
Recently I got the opportunity to do Sitecore's "Implementing Experience Commerce" training course, and get certified in the details of how Commerce works these days. While I was doing the lab exercises for the course I hit an interesting bug, which seemed like just the sort of thing that others might encounter.
So if you're extending the Commerce OData APIs, watch out:
I got a fun support ticket recently, for a client on Sitecore v8.1 whose analytics processing had stopped working. Their outstanding queue of raw analytics data that needed to be aggregated was slowly growing, and some functionality which relied on the existence of recent analyics data had stopped working. Trying to fix this caused me to look at two issues which are related to how Web Forms for Marketers data is processed in analytics – and these seemed like issues that other people who do support work might need info on...
Recently Steve McGill asked me if I'd tried using SIF's certificate creation when automating Solr setup for Sitecore. I realised I'd not put any effort into how this might work – and that seemed like an excellent excuse for some research...
Ever been asked to set up a Reverse Proxy to allow a particular URL on your website to fetch its content from a site somewhere else? It's not an uncommon requirement, but it seems to cause some configuration challenges too. Having been drafted in to solve some issues with just such a setup recently, here's a quick description of the stuff I need to remember next time I get this job:
Recently I was writing about the changes to Java licensing that Oracle are enforcing in 2019. It's not an uncommon reaction to the challenges that the new license introduces to start thinking about alternatives to how you might manage search for your Sitecore deployments. So what can you do?
It's Christmas, and I'm dreaming of a festive sherry, while I slog through my last working day of the year. So hopefully you can forgive me the flagrant clickbait headline... 😉
But you'd have to have your head in the sand not to have noticed that Oracle are changing the licensing terms for their builds of the Java runtime. They've decided that they want people and businesses to pay for the fastest access to support updates for Java. But as Sitecore developers, many of us make use of Solr – which relies on Java. So what can we do?
There are some things in Sitecore that you just take for granted will work. Loading items is a good example of this. I'll admit that user error can get in your way, but usually if you can see an item in the content tree, you can write code that will load it without issues. So I'll admit I was pretty confused when I came across a scenario recently where this did not appear to work correctly. In case anyone else hits this challenge, here's what happened:
This is one of those issues where I feel like I should have worked it out faster than I did. Computers are relentlessly logical. If you tell them to ignore something, they're going to ignore it, even if that does confuse your content editors...
There's been a bit of discussion (I might even go as far as to say ranting 😉 ) on the subject of not using "fast query" in your website code recently. I'm a supporter of this idea – but I came across an issue recently that points out why it's not always easy to be confident that you're not making use of it indirectly...
So, for the benefit of Google:
