Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
A requirement which comes up every so often is that external systems need to know about changes to content that lives in Sitecore. As with most technical problems, there are a variety of ways that you can solve a problem like this, and they all have different pros and cons. One of my colleagues has been working on a project like this recently, and the approach required there meant we bumped up against an interesting configuration challenge. If you're writing code that monitors content changes you might need to think about this:
Most of the time when I want to explore the filesystem of a Sitecore container, it's pretty easy. I can use Visual Studio's container browser. But that only works when a container is running - and if it's based on a job image this may be a very brief window - too brief to find and explore the file in question. So what can I do?
A while back I wrote a post about how you could extract the raw Solr query from Sitecore's ContentSearch APIs. Usually the queries hid behind LINQ operations, but there are times where having the raw text can be helpful - sometimes Sitecore's API doesn't support the operations you need. That work was done under Sitecore v10.0, but having tried to repeat it under v10.2, I discover it no longer works. There have been some changes under the surface of ContentSearch which require a different approach. So if you need to do this under v10.2, here's how:
After a bit more of a pause than most attendees of Symposium this year were expecting, Sitecore 10.3 is finally out in the wild now. And (to me at least) one of the most interesting changes is that the server-side event model for the CMS has been extended with Webhooks. What does that mean, and how can you make use of them? Well since I was lucky enough to get my hands on the "MVP Preview" of this release a couple of weeks back, I've had a chance to do some digging. Read on to find out...
I had a moment of confusion with broken Insert Options recently, which made me wonder whether I ever knew the answer behind the issue or whether I'd just forgotten it over the many years I've been working with this CMS. Either way, this needs writing down to help me remember it in the future...
Having been in Chicago for the last week to attend Symposium**1 and the MVP summit, I now have a notebook full of interesting observations. While some of that is under NDA and hence all Secret Squirrel, there were a collection of important public announcements which I can report. The key product and technical take-aways from the conferece are pretty important for customers and partners. So here's my summary:
Usually with these blog posts, I find a problem, I fight with it for a bit, and then I solve the problem. But this post has been sitting half-written in my publishing queue since May (!) this year, and I have entirely failed to solve this issue. So I'm admitting defeat, and publishing this anyway because maybe one of you knows the answer. Or at least it might serve as a warning...
My issue is that I've been working through some really odd and annoying Solr issues which only manifest in Docker on one laptop. I'm really not sure if these are issues that others might see, or if this is a problem that's entirely down to this laptop's setup. But they're definitely a problem...
One thing we don't seem to be short of these days is options for deploying Solr. I've had to do a bit of thinking about this recently, as I draw up plans for a work project. So I figured I'd write a bit of it down because if I'm having to explain it to people, then chances are there are plenty of others out there in Internet Land who are finding themselves having to think about these issues too:
For me at least, Symposium is going to be very interesting this year. The move to composable, the first big public event discussing the reality of XM Cloud and the new Sitecore Search product will all generate a lot of interesting content. Plus, with this being the first in-person event since the whole COVID business, I'm expecting quite a buzz this year. Since the first version of the agenda for the sessions was published last week, I've been doing a bit of thinking about what I want to watch in amongst all the great content. So here are some thoughts on the key breakout sessions I'd like to attend. Other than the one that I'm presenting, of course...
If you're part of the Sitecore Partner or MVP community then you probably watched some of the content from their "Global Sales Kick-off" recently. They talked about product roadmap and strategy stuff for the coming year, especially the new XM Cloud product. But something else which Dave O'Flanagan called out in his session is of interest to us in the community too: Sitecore's new internal demo portal.
The need to spin up a demo instance of Sitecore has been a common challenge for me over the time I've worked with the product. There have been various ways to do this - some very manual, and some involving a bit more automation. Different organisations and people all had their own approaches to how best to do this - but it's now being looked at centrally. I was lucky enough to get a sneak-peak of their new approach to this problem. And now it's been launched it seemed like something worth writing up, to make more Partners and MVPs aware of the tools at their disposal.
