Sitecore Media Cache : How to find media file in it?

In Sitecore Media Cache, the images are stored in MediaCache folder using a specific convention. This means if you need to locate an image in MediaCache folder, you need to understand this convention else you have to be really lucky to be able to find your image in MediaCache. I have many times figured this out earlier and then have also forgotten it when it was not needed. Recently, while working on a production issue, I again had to recall it to know if a media file is being served from MediaCache or not. So this time I decided to document it and share it with other developers in case they too struggle with it.

If you go to App_Data/MediaCache on your Sitecore instance, this is how a typical site folder in it looks like. All the media files for sites are cached in their site specific folders only -

If you go one level inside these folders, you will see this -

The above snapshot is from an example site which has few media items only. Your actual MediaCache folder may have hundreds of entries instead.

You will find there are typically two categories of files in these folders -

INI file - These are basically configuration files.
JPG, SVG, JS, CSS etc. - These are the media files cached on file system.

Typically, an INI file looks like below snapshot. The value against key represents a unique set of query parameters supplied in the media request and the value against dataFile is the file which will be served in response to the media request -

But the question is how to find the ini file related to you media file?

You might have observed that the ini file is named as a cleansed GUID. The GUID is actually the MediaID of the media item in media library. This MediaID is not same as the ID of the media item. In fact, the MediaID is a calculated value based on the below method -

You wont find the value for MediaID easily in Sitecore content editor or in Sitecore databases. Hence, I created a small PowerShell script to get the MediaID for media file -

$item = Get-Item -Path "master:/sitecore/media library/<path to your media file>"

$mediaItem = [Sitecore.Data.Items.MediaItem]::new($item)

$mediaData = [Sitecore.Resources.Media.MediaData]::new($mediaItem)

$mediaData.MediaId

This shall return you the MediaId of the media file as in snapshot below and then using that MediaId, you can search the related INI file in your App_Data/MediaCache folders.

Hope this helps you! Thanks for reading!!

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

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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 ;)

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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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