Configuring SolrCloud for XConnect

Published at December 13, 2018 ·  3 min read

Sitecore had a documentation page on their old doc site which detailed out how to setup Solr cloud for xConnect. That page has since been taken down and doesn’t appear to have been migrated to the new doc site. Luckily, I was able to find it cached. This blog post contains information taken from that cached page, mixed in with some of my own experiences. Getting Started You should already have Solr Cloud and Zookeeper setup and running with SSL....

Token Replacement on Sitecore Experience Forms

Published at August 10, 2018 ·  3 min read

Sitecore Experience Forms are new to Sitecore 9. This module is a built-from-the-ground-up replacement for the old Web Forms for Marketers and it’s pretty powerful. One of its features is multi-page forms. Multi-page forms means you can segment your form via next and previous buttons. One thing that isn’t really clear is how to pass data from one page to another. I wanted to figure out how to pass data across pages....

Checking for Experience Explorer Context in Sitecore 9

Published at November 3, 2017 ·  1 min read

With the release of Sitecore 9, a underappreciated DLL was removed: Sitecore.ExperienceExplorer.Business.dll. I’ve honestly never paid much attention to that DLL. The one thing I used it for, however, was determining if the current context was Experience Explorer. Synthesis made use of this: public class SitecoreRenderingContext : IRenderingContext { ... public bool IsExperienceExplorer => Sitecore.ExperienceExplorer.Business.Managers.ModuleManager.IsExpViewModeActive; ... } The new way of handling this is via the IsExplorerMode method in the ExplorerContext class....

Creating Custom Server Roles in Sitecore 9

Published at October 26, 2017 ·  2 min read

Sitecore 9 brings about a new feature: Server Roles. This is actually one of the features I was most excited about. What is a Server Role? Sitecore 9 ships with 5 server roles: ContentManagement, ContentDelivery, Processing, Reporting, Standalone. You can read more about what each role is used for from their documentation page. Using these server roles, you can conditionally load sections of configuration based off the server role. Rob Ahnemann wrote a more in-depth blog post that you should check out if you want more information on what you can do with server roles....

Autowiring XConnect Models

Published at October 24, 2017 ·  3 min read

I’ve been playing around with XConnect for the last few weeks and so far I like what I see. While playing around with custom models, I noticed that model schemas need to be manually registered. While not actually a big deal, this is an additional step that can be forgotten. I prefer to eliminate these “forgettable” tasks. I sought to determine a way of automatically wiring in these models. I’m pretty handy with reflection and figured if I could tag these models with an attribute, I could figure something out....