Sitecore Forms Bad Request Issue

If you are working on Sitecore form implementation, you might get Bad Request type issue after click of submit button or any action button on Form Page.


Fix
to overcome with this such type of issue, please make sure that form must have unique field name with without space.
If using multi-step Sitecore Form, then make sure each submit button must have unique name.

What's New with Sitecore Search ?

Like others, I was also attendee and part of Sitecore community at SUGCON India 2023. It was great pleasure and tons of chat with everyone.

After the 2 days events, I tried to consolidate my notes and thought to share Best first with community. And Product name is Sitecore Search.

Before deep dive into Sitecore Search, I would like to point out few statements from tech communities.

Forrester, "43% of user directly go to Search box, and leads generated 2-3 times more as compare to normal journey".

Sitecore, "Today Search is about more than just entering words into a box and hoping for the right results".

Previously with Sitecore, for search we were using solr/azure/lucene search providers. and with that

Challenge for Content & Marketer, There is lack of tooling for search experience.

Challenge for Developer & IT

• long time to implement
• complex scenario for development
• if any change request, then back to Team again
• Search Expertise required

And on that Sitecore came with SaaS products to resolve above challenges and introduced 2 composable search new products.

• For e-commerce search experience
• Sitecore Discover 
• Content Search experience
• Sitecore Search

In this article, I will share detailed key features and benefits of using Sitecore Search.

Benefits of using Sitecore search

• Great customer experience
• Personalization - 100% automation [easy to configure by marketers]
• Multiple Index sources, no need to changes existing external search indexing systems
• Marketer Friendly, mean marketer can easily manage search experience without any technical knowledge
• Trunkey setup building fast with simple implementation

A separate Sitecore search platform to manage, configuration on Search result items. Below are the major key points that can be used:

• Track Site search performance
• Overall engagement
• Preview Search engagement
• Search Page engagement
• Recommendation engagement
• All tracking data easily to download, sharing, exporting functionality with Marketers
• Pages
• Can have different result pages variants[A/B testing]
• Can play with common widgets across pages
• Can PIN results on particular searched key to show particular item on top
• Can boost items on particular searched key
• Can Personalized as well on particular searched key
• Can burry Current or Blacklist current particular item based on usages
• On Variations, we will be having section to get and modify items under Boost Rules, Burry Rules and Blacklist Rules
• Analytics - to view analytics
• Widget view
• Content by views
• Content by clicks
• Content report by Date Range, devices, Region
• Keyword view
• On searched key, Content report by Date Range, devices, Region
• Clicks, views, unique searches
• How many search results based on searched key
• Null searches
• Biggest gainer and decliners
• Catalog - to add different website as well, to get the results from different sources.
• Administrator tools

With Sitecore Search, we will be having a feature to get other sites search results to manage. Mean that we can interact with Indexes resources (WEB and API Crawlers) using endpoints and can manage using available tooling.


Hope this will help to understand better about Sitecore Search.

SearchStax Sitecore Schema populate Failing Issue

Recently we come to know with one of the known issue that if you install latest SearchStax module with Sitecore https://www.searchstax.com/docs/searchstudio/sitecore-module-2/ and then after creating new app using SearchStax Configuration module page.
Once new app created and then try to run Populate schema, will get solr connectivity exception.

Basically above issue coming because of timeout connectivity issue - and it is known by SearchStax.
Currently if you are facing such issue then

Please get latest hotfix Sitecore SearchStax official module. Directly installing will help to fix this issue.

 

How to fix Solr downtime issue

Recently I came across a scenario, where solr was down. And because of that Issue - all page which using solr logic related component having issue.

Solr down time issue might occur because of

• Index got deleted
• JVM full
• Solr service stopped
• Solr server having issue

To avoid such issue in future, most of the projects used base class for Search related logic. Please make sure try-catch mechanism applied.

try

{

using (var context = searchIndex.CreateSearchContext())

{   

  var queryable = context.GetQueryable<S>();

         //search logic   

          var results = queryable.GetResults();

          if (results == null) 

return new S[] { };

  return results.ToList();

}

}

catch (Exception e)

{

Log.Error(e.Message, e, this);

return new S[] { };

}

DNS Switch for Sitecore SSO Enabled Application

Recently I worked on a scenario where after an application upgrade and before go live, we were looking to switch DNS for SSO enabled Sitecore Web Application.



There are few and simple steps to follow:

There will be 2 URLs (Live and Upgraded Application), let's say L and U

• From Site Definition configuration file, swap hostName and targetHostName values between L and U config files.
• Since we were using WSO2 for SSO authentication, and input request SAML settings were done in web.config, So just need to swap SAML setting values between L and U.
• Please connect with your WSO2 team mate for SSO Url updates, by adding new ACS Url to authenticate with SSO.

That's it. For us after above 3 changes - it worked.

sitecore create new content disabled Issue

 There are scenarios where on Sitecore Experience editor or from Page's presentation details - Associated Content Popup, for particular rendering will see Create new Content is disabled.

To resolve above issue, I found that if we did setup Datasource template on rendering more than one. Then above feature will automatically disable.

Because if we have more than one type of template for data item to be selected on rendering. Then Sitecore will get confused that after click Create New Content, which type of data item will created.


Note: Please make sure only one type of template path set on Rendering's Datasource Template field.