Link Description Length Validator

Published at September 30, 2016 ·  4 min read

Today’s adventure is about custom validators. A feature I’m working on has a requirement that a link’s description must be no longer than 60 characters. I decided to look at the field validators that Sitecore comes with. The closest one I could find was the “Max Length 40” validator located at: /sitecore/system/Settings/Validation Rules/Field Rules/Sample/Max Length 40 I setup a template and slapped that validator onto the general link field and, as I expected, it didn’t work right:...

Upgrading Sitecore 6.6 to .NET 4.5

Published at July 3, 2016 ·  2 min read

Last week I had to update a Sitecore 6.6 site to .NET 4.5. The upgrade went just fine. After it was done, I flipped through the pages on the front end and everything looked fine. Next, I tried Sitecore to make sure everything was working. I clicked around the content editor for a good 15 minutes. Everything looked fine. Since I was already logged in due to the “remember me” feature, I didn’t notice at first that the login page was broken....

Automatically Resolving Home Item on an API Controller with Multiple Sites

Published at June 20, 2016 ·  2 min read

I was writing a method in a Web Api controller that was supposed to get data from a field. For now, let’s call the field “MicroSite Name”. To do so, I wrote a method that could be simplified down to this: [HttpGet] public string GetMicroSiteName() { return _sitecoreService.GetHomeItem<ISite2HomeItem>().Settings.MicroSiteName; } When I called that method from the front-end, I received a Null Reference Exception. Confused by this, I dug into it a bit further....

Sitecore Tips and Tricks: The Gutter

Published at May 30, 2016 ·  2 min read

Sitecore’s content editor has a handy feature called the gutter. The gutter shows up on the left hand side of the content editor, and is a great way of showing information about a content item at a glance. Some handy things it can show you: Item Buckets Cloned Items Personalizations Multivariant Tests My Locked Items Locked Items Workflow State Broken Links Missing Versions Publishing Warnings Presentation Overridden Let’s take a quick look at a gutter: example of a gutter...

Custom Product Sync Button

Published at April 3, 2016 ·  5 min read

Today’s adventure is about custom ribbon buttons, asynchronous commands, and progress dialogs. One of my recent projects deals with a 3rd party integration with a PIM (Product Information Management) system and Sitecore. This is not a very heavy integration. The PIM is the system of authority when it comes to a product’s description, price, color options, sizes, etc. Sitecore obtains this information via a REST API provided by the PIM. This information is fetched and transformed into Sitecore items, which we then store in a bucketed “Products” folder....

Sitecore 8 Package Installer over HTTPS

Published at February 28, 2016 ·  3 min read

Last week I was performing a deployment to our QA environment when I came across something odd. I was performing a routine content package install to Sitecore and all of the sudden I see “installation failed.” This particular package had been installed on 3 environments prior to QA, so I was confused. I dug into the logs to see if I could see the problem: ManagedPoolThread #18 14:24:01 INFO Job started: Install ManagedPoolThread #18 14:24:01 INFO Installing package: E:\inetpub\wwwroot\qa\web\Data\packages\normal-content-package....