What are resource files in Sitecore 10.1?

Do you know that version 10.1 onwards, Sitecore is storing default items as resource files. This is an interesting update as the files on disk are binary-serialized item data using Google’s ProtoBuf specification – in this case using the ProtoBuf.Net library for .Net.

Why to store item as resource files?

Sitecore has lots of out-of-box items like sitecore/content/Home which are present in Sitecore databases. Sitecore has changed this approach to store these items on file system as resource files as ProtoBuf data to solve the complexity related to upgrading the Sitecore instances especially in containerized environments.

If you have an instance of Sitecore 10.1 or above running, you will find these below files. Default Sitecore items are part of these files now -

How do they help in upgrades?

In containerized solution, code and config updates are wrapped in Docker Image. When the out of box Sitecore items are placed in resource files, they get updated as part of Docker Image itself. There is no need of running a separate job to update items in databases.

How do we edit items in resource files?

We cannot edit an item loaded from resource files until we unprotect it. The moment we unprotect an item served from resource files, a copy of the item gets persisted in database and can be seen there. Any subsequent updates are reflected into the database now. Whenever a user access this item in Sitecore UI, it is loaded from the database now instead of resource files on file system. This is achieved through CompositeDataProvider implemented in Sitecore 10.1 and above.

Some more related information on this -

Due to default Sitecore items being stored in resource files and not in database now, rows in content databases are less and hence, publishing operations are much faster. There’s no need to ever publish an item that’s in the ProtoBuf data – because that’s on both your CM and CD servers. So publish operation has to read only the database rows that are left. Hence a “Republish all” operation now has lesser data to process – and is going to finish much faster.
A side-effect of this model is that you cannot delete items which exist in resource files. You get an error dialog saying “Some of selected items are in resources and cannot be deleted”. But this should not impact as we rarely need to delete any of default Sitecore items
Going forward, a similar approach can be followed by Sitecore modules too. For e.g. SXA 10.2 is going to store its default items in resource files

Sitecore PowerShell Script to create all language versions for an item from en version

We have lots of media items and our business wants to copy the data from en version of media item to all other language versions defined in System/Languages. This ensures that media is available in all the languages. So, we created the below powershell script to achieve the same - #Get all language versions defined in System/Languages $languages = Get-ChildItem /sitecore/System/Languages -recurse | Select $_.name | Where-Object {$_.name -ne "en"} | Select Name #Ensuring correct items are updated by comparing the template ID $items = Get-ChildItem -Path "/sitecore/media library/MyProjects" -Recurse | Where-Object {'<media item template id>' -contains $_.TemplateID} #Bulk update context to improve performance New-UsingBlock (New-Object Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext) { foreach($item in $items){ foreach($language in $languages){ $languageVersion = Get-Item -Path $item.Paths.Path -Language $language.Name #Check if language versi

Export Sitecore media library files to zip using SPE

If you ever require to export Sitecore media files to zip (may be to optimize them), SPE (Sitecore Powershell Extension) has probably the easiest way to do this for you. It's as easy as the below 3 steps - 1. Right click on your folder (icons folder in snap)>Click on Scripts> Click on Download 2. SPE will start zipping all the media files placed within this folder. 3. Once zipping is done, you will see the Download option in the next screen. Click Download Zip containing the media files within is available on your local machine. You can play around with the images now. Hope this helps!! Like and Share ;)

Make Sitecore instance faster using Roslyn Compiler

When we install the Sitecore instance on local, the first load is slow. After each code deploy also, it takes a while for the Sitecore instance to load and experience editor to come up. For us, the load time for Sitecore instance on local machines was around 4 minutes. We started looking for ways to minimize it and found that if we update our Web.config to use Roslyn compiler and include the relevant Nugets into the project, our load times will improve. We followed the simple steps - Go to the Project you wish to add the NuGet package and right click the project and click 'Manage NuGet Packages'. Make sure your 'Package Source' is set to nuget.org and go to the 'Browse' Tab and search Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform. Install whichever version you desire, make sure you note which version you installed. You can learn more about it here . After installation, deploy your project, make sure the Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.d

Experience of a first time Sitecore MVP

The Journey I have been working in Sitecore for almost 10 years now. When I was a beginner in Sitecore, I was highly impressed by the incredible community support. In fact, my initial Sitecore learning path was entirely based on community written blogs on Sitecore. During a discussion with my then technology lead Neeraj Gulia , he proposed the idea that I should start giving back to developer community whenever I get chance. Just like I have been helped by many developers via online blogs, stackoverflow etc., I should also try to help others. Fast forward a few years and I met Nehemiah Jeyakumar (now an MVP). He had a big archive of his technical notes in the form Sitecore blogs. I realized my first blog dont have to be perfect and it can be as simple as notes to a specific problem for reference in future. That's when I probably created my first blog post on Sitecore. At that time, I didn't knew about the Sitecore MVP program. Over the years, I gained more confidence to write

Clean Coding Principles in CSharp

A code shall be easy to read and understand. In this post, I am outlining basic principles about clean coding after researching through expert recommended books, trainings and based on my experience. A common example to start with is a variable declaration like - int i The above statement did not clarify the purpose of variable i. However, the same variable can be declared as - int pageNumber The moment we declared the variable as int pageNumber, our brain realized that the variable is going to store the value for number of pages. We have set the context in our brain now and it is ready to understand what the code is going to do next with these page numbers. This is one of the basic advantages of clean coding. Reasons for clean coding - • Reading clean code is easier - Every code is revisited after certain amount of time either by the same or different developer who created it. In both the cases, if the code is unclean, its difficult to understand and update it. • To avoid s

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