Ghanendra's Tips

Pretty much all the Sitecore development is happening in Agile. Hence, code is released more frequently to live servers than it used to be in waterfall models. This also means there is a need of testing after each release. A regression in QA environment and a smoke test in STAGE environment is required to ensure that the development done in sprint does not break any thing else. This is the job of QA team. Why are we talking about it here? If your team is testing Sitecore functionalities manually, then it is wise to automate at least some of your test cases. Testing some basic Sitecore functionalities like login, publishing etc. manually is something QA team can easily do but when one needs to automate it, QA developers needs to have some knowledge of Sitecore also and vice-versa.  Hence, here is a simple blog on guiding how to develop some basic automated test cases in Sitecore. Lets get started.. In this blog, I am taking example of a basic scenario which includes testing that your us

Hello friends! In this blog I am going to talk about fundamentals of Azure Functions.  Azure Functions is a server less solution that allows you to write less code, maintain less infrastructure, and save on costs. Instead of worrying about deploying and maintaining servers, the cloud infrastructure provides all the up-to-date resources needed to keep your applications running. Hence, main advantages of Azure Functions are -  serverless programming highly scalable low cost Azure Functions can be look on as Events + Code which means all we have to do is to write code and then tell Azure what trigger will run the code. A trigger can be a scheduler, a message in MessageQueue, a new item in blob storage, a http request etc. So how do we run code in Azure - Azure VM install whatever u want web servers, windows services etc IaaS complete control of the serverless choose your operating system You are responsible patching and maintaining scaling operational ov

 We are on Sitecore 10.1.2 and we use Sitecore Publishing Service module. We often encounter random unresponsiveness of Publishing Service where content authors report that they tried publish an item or a site but the publishing dialog seemed unresponsive and errored out as in snapshot below after few seconds - When we looked at the publishing service logs, we could see that it disposed off all the connections but did not attempt at recreating them. An application pool recycle solves the problem but the catch is this blocks the content authors from publishing their changes until a developer gets to recycle the application pool for the publishing service. We had an option of scheduled application pool recycle for the Publishing service but our application is used 24x7 across the globe by content authors for editing their content. So there were chances that application pool recycle may kill any publishing jobs and then create further problems. As an attempt to solve this problem, we star

 The Problem While working in Experience Editor in Sitecore 10.1.2, content authors started reporting that clicking on Lock and Edit link doesnt lock the page sometimes. Content Authors have to reload the page to work or use Content Editor to Edit the page. This has been reported by multiple users at multiple times and is not consistently reproducible. The Research We have observed that when Lock and Edit is unresponsive, it doesnt trigger any requests in Network tab in browser dev tools. When Lock and Edit is responsive, it triggers several requests in Network tab. The HTML for Lock and Edit appears same in both the cases without any missing fields. The console tab doesnt contain any errors. To learn more on this issue, I created a Sitecore Support ticket. Sitecore support representative was able to reproduce the issue on her local instance as well. Below is the response from Sitecore -  "I was able to reproduce this behavior in the local environment and, since this is not the ex

THE PROBLEM We are on Sitecore 10.1 and we use Sitecore Publishing Service for publishing. Recently, we encountered an issue where our items selected in a custom field (called as Multilist Dynamic Source with Search ) were not published even when Related Items checkbox was checked in the Publish Dialog. However, the items selected in the Multilist fields publish properly. Hence, we ruled out the possibility of Sitecore Publishing Service configurations not pointing to correct database that stores Link DB. We discussed that issue in a previous  blog . Multilist or any custom field based on Multilist stores the selected items as a pipe separated list of ItemIDs. You can verify this by looking at the Raw Values of the field. When a user published a page and checked the checkbox for Related Items , then the expectation was that the items selected in Multilist or the custom field of a rendering datasource shall also get published. In our case where we used the custom field based on Multilis

 The Problem Recently, we encountered a weird problem where one of our sites in Experience Editor will resolve to default website and not to the correct site. This happened when an author or developer opened Content Editor and tried to select one of the pages in the SXA site and then clicked on Experience Editor in Publish tab to open the page in Experience Editor, the page opened with the following errors -  On checking the logs, we found that logs contains following entries for each SXA site -  We never saw these kind of errors earlier in our logs.  The Solution We started validating what is wrong with our site definitions. To our surprise, everything configured in site definitions appeared normal except the fact that a recent change was introduced to enable Enforce version presence. We soon found out a KB from Sitecore talking about the same problem - https://support.sitecore.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1002873 According to it -  An SXA site might not be resolved

In this blog post, I have shared information about Sitecore Search. Most of the content in this post are my notes from a webinar presented by development team of Sitecore Search that I felt I should share with you :) What is Sitecore Search? Sitecore Search is an API first product designed by Sitecore to build search experiences from scratch without the need of complex code. The APIs can be integrated in any solution and the look and feel can be configured to match the application. Sitecore SPEAK also provides some UI elements that can be integrated with these APIs to build the search experience. Sitecore Search can be a great offering while re-platforming an application. In this post, we will learn more about capabilities of Sitecore Search. How Sitecore Search can help your organization? Sitecore search is great for marketers. It empowers them to configure searchable experiences without need of technology personnel. It enhances content discovery which generates more leads. Hence, it