Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
A while back I wrote up some notes on a problem some people were seeing with Sitecore's SolrCloud developer container that I'd been unable to fix. It was the worst sort of technical problem, happening irregularly on some computers, but never rearing its head on others. So it's taken me a while to get around to coming up with a fix for this. But if you've suffered from the problems described in my previous post, this is an option for you:
One of the interesting announcements from last year's Symposium was Sitecore's approach to how we might join up our composable applications. They announced that they were working on "Sitecore Connect" at this event, but didn't really get into detail of what it would be outside of "we're re-badging Workato". So what is that, and what does it suggest we might get out of Connect in the future? Read on, for an attempt at working that out...
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:
