Dependency Injection with WFFM

Posted on by jammykam

There were a number of changes in the 8.1 release of the Web Forms For Marketers module, it was a fairly significant rewrite but not unusual given the introduction of a number of abstractions within the core product itself. In hindsight, all this was just setting the stage for the introduction of Dependency Injection in Sitecore 8.2.

One of the big changes in WFFM now allows us to inject dependencies into Save Actions using configuration. I’ve not seen this blogged previously and the documentation is a little sparse on this subject so thought it is worth reviewing since it has also come up on StackExchange before.

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Site Specific Link Manager (Part 2) – Sitecore 8.2 Dependency Injection Support

Posted on by jammykam

I previously blogged about a Switching Link Provider for Sitecore, allowing you use a different LinkProvider for different sites.

There were a number of changes in Sitecore 8.2 to LinkManager/Provider as a result of the Dependency Injection changes, unfortunately one of them being the Providers collection being marked [Obsolete]. The code in the old post should still work, but you’ll get that annoying warning.

The previous code worked by creating a Link Provider which acted as a switcher that in turn called a different Provider. This was a hack because we could not switch out the Link Manager itself. Well the DI changes in Sitecore 8.2 allow us to do that instead and provide our own implementation of LinkManager instead.

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Code Samples and Sitecore Query Cheat Sheet from John West Posts

Posted on by jammykam

The legend that is John West, a.k.a. SitecoreJohn.

Following the move of the blog posts from the old site to the Community Site last year things have not been quite right. Luckily John West had an archive of the code samples, so I’ve put them all on Github:

https://github.com/jammykam/Sitecore.SharedSource.JohnWest

I’ve uploaded both the protoype code samples and compressed archives, hopefully this will make it easier to quickly view the code rather than having to download/extract the zip files like before!

You might also be looking for these handy gems:

Thank you John West for providing the archive of the code samples!

Enjoy.

Show Fieldname in Experience Editor Placeholder Text

Posted on by jammykam

A few weeks ago on Sitecore Slack chat, fellow MVP Neil Shack discovered a tucked away setting in the renderField pipeline. Enabling this causes the field name to be rendered in the default placeholder text in Experience Editor mode:

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Glass Edit Frame – Immediately Invoking Wrapper

Posted on by jammykam

tl;dr; Custom HTML Helper to wrap Glass Edit Frame and JS code to immediately open the modal dialog for editing

As I’m sure most of you are aware, I 😍 Glass Mapper. So much so that I struggle with the native Sitecore API 😂 

Version 4 of the framework added an amazing feature which allows you to very simply and quickly create/bind to Edit Frames purely from code. Normally this is a bit of an annoying and long winded processing: switch over to the core database, create an item with names of the fields, serialize/sync to source control, do this for every combination of fields you have, hook it up to EditFrame code that until recently did not work in native Sitecore MVC 😆

I’m sure you’ve been using this feature, it’s super simple from code to add an EditFrame wherever you need and the best part is it’s bound against your strongly typed model:

@using (BeginEditFrame(Model.Page, "Edit Metadata", x => x.DisplayInMenu, x => x.Closed))
{
  <div>Let's add an Edit Frame around our rendering</div>
}

If you need to add another field then simply add it to the list of fields and Glass handles everything for you.

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Inheriting and Extending Sitecore JavaScript

Posted on by jammykam

Whenever possible I try to extend Sitecore as cleanly as possible, such as trying to patch into pipelines and event handlers or overriding dialog without replacing the default ones. It’s not always possible and sometimes you just have to dive it and get things done. You’ll see the same thing in my blog posts, some are more “cleanly” implemented than others.

There have been a number of times when I need to supplement some existing code or to fix a bug in some Sitecore code. The usual way I have done this is to get dirty and edit the JS files directly. Not great, but it was quick 😀 It’s also the exact same thing that Sitecore Support does whenever we have to apply a JS fix.

I’ve generally found that it’s easier to extend C# code, since it’s where I am more familiar. But usually with the JS I have hacked and updated the default Sitecore files. Cos you know, when you simply need to add an extra 9 characters, you can’t be spending the whole day trying to figure out “a more clean way”. Ain’t nobody got time….

But that was then and this is now, so I’ll share some techniques for extending Sitecore JavaScript without resorting to direct file edits. It also makes it difficult to build something into a shareable and installable module. All of these methods require you to inject in some additional resource files that I have previously blogged about.

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Disable Edit and Preview Modes on your CD servers

Posted on by jammykam

A real quick post on something that stumped me and had me scratching my head last week. A colleague mentioned that when browsing the Production site with ?sc_mode=edit appended to the URL then the site would attempt to redirect the user to /sitecore/login page. In some cases it would cause an infinite redirect and cause the browser to throw a “redirected too many times error”.

In and of itself, it didn’t cause any security issues – the CM server was only accessible to our internal network and we had followed server hardening best practices and blocked access to the CMS interface on the CD servers (we actually just return a 404 rather than anything specific related to access denied).

We had also correctly followed the guide to configure a CD server so was pretty sure it was not related to having missed disabling a file.

So I asked on Slack if it was expected behaviour that appending ?sc_mode=edit would attempt to redirect to login page on the CD servers, I would have expected it to do nothing. Having then dug a little into the Context code, turns out there is a setting for this which we had completely overlooked.

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Resolving Custom Context.Item in Sitecore MVC

Posted on by jammykam

One of the most common customizations that I have seen in Sitecore is the addition of custom processors in the httpRequestBegin pipeline, usually to add is some custom logic to resolve the context item, maybe to deal with custom URLs or wildcard items. Since this pipeline runs for every single request, there are plenty of reasons to customize here.

Most often I’ve seen , you plug in after the Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver processor with whatever your custom requirements are. However, if you are using Sitecore MVC (and I hope you are) then you may find that your custom logic has not been applied and the Sitecore.Context.Item has been reset back to default Sitecore logic.

This has come up a number of times on Slack and caught a few colleagues out. It also caught me out a while back when I was doing some wildcard work with MVC:

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Sitecore Desktop PowerPoint Presentation Template

Posted on by jammykam

In January 2017 I presented at the Sitecore London User Group. Since I work freelance, I don’t have a deck of corporate PowerPoint slides that I need to pimp out for presentation or demos. Apparently those default Microsoft themes are also boring.

So I got round to creating a slide deck. And since I was presenting at a Sitecore usergroup, why not make it Sitecore themed and make it like the desktop! A couple of people asked for it, so here you go.

Download: Sitecore Presentation Template

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Injecting Resources into Experience Editor in Powerful Ways

Posted on by jammykam

I recently got a ping back from Eric Stafford on an old blog article of mine, the first one I had ever posted! He was working on some code and needed to inject in some custom CSS into the Experience Editor. We had several conversations on Slack, and I thought I’d post up some powerful ways in which to achieve this. Be sure to check out Eric’s posts, he’s done a fair amount of research into different ways of achieving this as well.

Javascript

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