Glass Surprise - Get Your Ancestors like a champ

Glass just makes me so happy!  I do not have to write same 10-15 lines of code every time to do something very mundane when it comes to Sitecore.  Every other feature on sitecore demands some kind of relationship driven items to be accessible from context page on which your module would do some magic on.
Typically, developers tend to write their own custom code to do such things which would lead to bad performance when not done right.  Why not just go with Glass if you are using it in your instance development? It is far more easier.  I had done a similar blog post to grab children from Glass, but, this time around it is Ancestors.  Though similar, it could help some one who did not think or know that it could be used on both the relation ships on the tree, upwards or downwards.

Steps to do this is quite simple and three step process

1.  Declare a custom partial class that extends your auto generated class based on say a template.  For example like below.  I like to keep these guys organized, usually do it in special Model project and namespace related to it, to keep things easy and manageable, so some one can easily know if the model has been extended. 
2. Next up, add a Attribute that comes with Glass such as below, pass your template ID.  I actually tried getting this ID from a config setting which would have been great for maintenance, see if you can do that based on your project settings 
3. Access the new ancestor strongly typed( A bonus, so you dont need to cast and make a messy view, the view simply get's what it needs and you access and ensure your checks are in place)

Sample Code Of Custom Partial Class 

namespace YourProject.Models

{

    public partial class Your_Template_Auto_Generated_Class

    {

        [SitecoreQuery("./ancestor-or-self::*[@@templateid='{7E6BC980-362C-4BBB-97E5-9DAA83B70812}']", IsRelative = true)]        

        public virtual Your_Strongly_Typed_class myAncerstorItem { get; set; }

    }

}

Voila! Goal accomplished and the best part clean code, clean views and happy MVC. 

Have a great weekend ahead!!!

Custom Sorting on Coveo Facet

I got to use a new feature of Coveo today because of new requirements.  How fun, though the request that came through felt not needed and a corner case in terms of user experience.  Pushing through limit is what we have to do if you have got super picky clients. :)
The outcome is always precious as you get to learn something new.   Here is the snapshot of what happened and how we were able to get it working per request and requirement.

Goal - Regardless of selections made on Coveo Facet because of url appending, the sort order of values available on facet stay per the field on which sort is based on.

Problem - The inherent default behavior of Coveo for better UX experience.  To be honest, I actually like what they have in terms of grouping the values selected to the top and rest are sorted based on the sort field set up.  But, we have to some how overwrite this default behavior.

Firstly, our front end contact explored why this happens and how coveo groups them the way it does inherently.  The reason for special attention that these selected values get is because of the below. Thanks to our front end resource to find this out.  Though we did not pursue anything in modifying this, it is always good to know the reasons behind how it is currently done.

https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SearchREST/Group+By+Results

So, the reason is that when there is an appending in URL for a selection of a value or set of values in the facet, Coveo inherently tags these as Desired and hence the special treatment for those to be on the top.

For example, if your URL is like below may be because the user clicked on back button post user selected few values and moved on his journey, the user could land on pages like this or if marketing team linked off the user to a page with pre-selected values on a facet.  There could be more scenarios where your user would bump in to this situation, but to name a few.

Example URL - https://www.domain.com/press-releases-events-and-webcasts-landing#f:articlePostYear=[2017,2018]

The selected would be grouped on top like below due to the above explained reason.

 Again, I like what Coveo does inherently and I suspect that this needs to overridden in simple cases, but, if you absolutely need to do this? Which is where we stood, I logged a Q and A below and luckily got a direction.  I only wish there were more graceful options, but, we took what we got as well, we had to overwrite this and there was no other option unfortunately.

If you are curious, follow the discussion here and I will explain more in detail how I actually implemented what was recommended by Coveo team.

https://answers.coveo.com/questions/12071/facet-values-mentionedgrabbed-in-allowed-values-be.html?childToView=12086#answer-12086

Steps I did to Implement this solution:

1. Created a copy of default Coveo MVC view for facet and named it differently and placed under correct project specific location. 
2. Add the below line to the view created just above end of div tag in place for the facet
   data-custom-sort="2024,2023,2022,2021,2020,2019,2018,2017,2016,2015,2014">
3. Note - With addition of this, we should be good on sorting with lower limit of 2014 to upper limit of 2014, based on your project data you could decide on good numbers for these limits. Only deal is post 2024, if this project has same implementation, we will need a code deploy to ensure sort works as expected. 
4. Use this new view item on presentation for the facet and select all appropriate values that a coveo facet would need on the templates affected or will use such type of facet  
5. That is it!! Post this change regardless if values are selected via url or not, the ordering will be based on data-custom-sort 

Sitecore Launch Hiccups and Resolution

I know it has been a while, Vacationing and launch has been no joke on my side. :)
It has surely taken a toll and kept me away from blogging for quite a few days.  Finally, today I got some time to jot down the experiences of my launch after a pause.

Time Taken: 14 hrs straight starting 5.00 PM to Mid night around 2.00 AM PST, it was a grueling long night and I was supporting the go-live from India, how fun!

Sadly, I did not expect any issues or what so ever because we had code already up and running on the actual servers with all the things working and QA/UAT pass.  The only thing that was changing was DNS and binding being different, rest everything was absolutely same.  Well, everything does not happen as planned especially on the launch day.   I was supporting using a fairly fast internet for Indian standards, but, still fell a little short as I was used to things being done fast.

Below are few hiccups and how we resolved each of these, hope it helps some one who is stuck in a similar situation.

1. xDB Cloud working excellent on sandbox license, but, lot of issues when swapped to prod license.    While launching the site, we obviously have to swap the connection strings to use production xDB license provided by sitecore.  We did so, but, as a surprise we encountered bunch of errors on logs and had to re-visit all the related configs to ensure we did everything as expected.  Sitecore did not mention in support ticket that extra steps would be needed on live license which are additional as compared to non-prod xDB license.  We followed the below blog and added host file entry as mentioned and left hostname empty on configuration. https://sitecorehacker.com/2017/02/12/sitecore-analytics-tracker-common-issues-and-how-to-resolve-them/
2. IIS security hardening done prior to enabling anonymous access to the site.  It is kind of common practice that when we have a pre-prod or staging site behind some kind of authentication to ensure site is not publicly available since it is meant to be.  As part of deployment strategy, we had steps listed and unfortunately they were ordered incorrectly.  Since, enabling anonymous on parent site would trigger that change to all children and folders within the site, the hardening we had done per sitecore recommendations on CD servers was lost and we had to re-do the steps.  These things add time post launch especially on VPN, connected to remote servers from INDIA. lol
3. Coveo cache - Still unsure what was causing Coveo to access a URL that is no longer configured on either Server URL or for that matter any where else.  While rebuilding master index, it kept failing saying that could not reach to a binding which is no longer available.  I am assuming it is some kind of cache, unsure where or what at this time.  I ensured there was no trace of old/outdated URL any where by going to /showconfig.aspx and also reviewing coveo configuration files.  Still a mystery to solve, but fortunately the error did not mean indexes were not built, so, we were safe to move forward and were successfully able to rebuild other web and liveweb indexes with out errors. 
4. Cache - It is a boon and blessing.  We had set up cache on all renderings applicable.  But, there was a slight miss.  Parent placeholders that carried WFFM should not be allowed to cache, but, there were few misses which were uncovered only on regression testing that few forms were not working, once we removed cacheable setting on these renderings forms started working like a charm. 
5. Errors on Log files -  It is important to monitor log files to check for any major errors on the logs that clutter the server and could have slow response times.  We un-covered a few and still in progress on identifying all the outstanding issues. 
6. Redirects -  On our lower environments we had few different settings like www was being forced as it was not needed which was enabled post launch as a requirement.  This started throwing off the logic and plan around redirects.  We had to revamp the redirects loaded to ensure they are working alright and corrected few instances.  Especially when migrating or unifying multiple sites this could pose a challenge.  How I wish we had exact same settings and tested the logic against that to reduce this back and forth. 

At the end, all was well.  I am glad we stretched it instead of calling it off, it is a worst feeling to do a rollback.  Launch would mean a great move in the forward direction, never would want to associate it with a failure.  I am glad the site went live and has been appreciated both internally and public facing. 

Looking forward to more adventures in the future.   

Happy Weekend every one!

A different paradigm to bump up your site performance

You might have seen ample number of blogs, information and other resources out there that talk about the same topic.  But, I will try and make this in steps, so you have step-by-step guide all in here and you will surely spend less time scraping this data from 10 other places.
At the end, I will also list references on where I gathered all this from, so, you can refer and read more if you are an enthusiastic reader.

Have you heard about Google page speed extension?  If you did not, it is fine and I will not say you were living in a cave, in this functional desire world, I wonder why performance is always addressed at the very end of the tunnel in software life cycle.  I would go ahead and say a simple performance test plan should be part of every step of implementation.   It could be simple, but invasive.  It would help mitigate surprises which usually take time to resolve.

There are tons of tools out there as well to measure performance, but, I got hooked on to Google page speeds extension as it is easy to visualize and Google does do a good job of providing links to problems that were uncovered which would provide good insight to multiple solutions to the problem on hand.

Let us get this started -

1. First do not expect anything,  don't assume that your site is great or worst in terms of performance.  Just download the extension of your favorite choice, I like the Google Page Speeds extension, but, you could run anything
2. Address to one's Google put's more weight on and are in red.  I think that would be the critical one's for sure.  I did the following and saw immediate boost on numbers

Images and Images (Scaling and Optimization)

Firstly ensure you are scaling images on server side (Using Glass params) instead of depending on content authors to upload files of certain dimensions.  Though we tried to enforce this through documentation and collaboration, we still saw lapse.
Best way to battle this is use Glass params, then, regardless of whether recommended size is respected or not, your browser will not spend ton of time sizing and re-sizing images to fit your FEE needs(css)
Get the params based on FEE recommendations, the best thing to do is set width and let height be auto.

Example :@RenderImage(carouselSlide, m => m.Carousel_Image, new { @class = "carousel__image", w = 684, width = 684 }, true, outputHeightWidth: true)

Please re-upload all imagery that is not respecting the dimensions.  This is important for performance and critical 

Also, ensure good/web optimized imagery is loaded on to media library.  If tool complains that some images could do better in terms of performance, please re-upload the culprits.  Should be quick and the tool offers a download option on each of the offensive currently uploaded image.  Go to sitecore editor and do simple attach/detach.  You are done. 

Make sure all your site specific css/js is minified and only those minified versions are accessed in your HTML or view code

Ensure web server has compression enabled.  This is a simple check of a checkbox available on IIS under compression for a specific site(Ensure static compression is checked).  Sometimes, if installation is not done correctly even if you checkbox this it might not work.  Please ensure this works by looking at Network request and content-encoding attribute is being set as 'gzip'.  You can check in fiddler or on Google chrome by toggling the column display to show this response header.  If you dont see gzip, please check with support once you ensure you have enabled the IIS settings properly and things seem off.  This is v important for performance and must be ensured is working 

Enable cache control on static resources on web.config to ensure you enable this after talking to your FEE team on what would be a good max age time.  It could vary based on multiple things and should be verified with your team.

After these steps, please follow sitecore performance tuning guide no less than Bible(link in references), go over all content delivery preferences and ensure you set all of them correctly.  When in question about something please check with your support team.

That is it, you just made your sitecore instance super efficient.  The tuning guide should also cover caching best practices which should bump up good performance benefit second load on wards.

Happy Sitecoring!!

Few Good References

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore7/70/cms_tuning_guide_sc70-72-usletter.pdf
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-pagespeed-insights/edbkhhpodjkbgenodomhfoldapghpddk?hl=en
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/EnableCompression

Deeper dive in to Coveo Advanced Expressions

In our implementation we stumbled upon looking at what Coveo calls 'aq' bunch of times.  It is simply because of complexity involved on our implementation where we had to bend Coveo a little to achieve what the business needs are.

First up, let us first understand a little what is aq, dq and cq per Coveo.  They have beautiful documentation that iterates what these are.
https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SearchREST/Query+Parameters

So, every time a query is fired by Coveo rendering because of coveo components you have on the page.   All these query parameters based on what is applicable is generated by Coveo, you can see this on Network tab in your browser when you take a look at Request headers and parameters.  If what coveo generates satisfies your business goals, you are good to call it a day.  But, what if it is not enough, you have to then modify and tweak to achieve what is needed.

When it comes to modifying the aq generated gracefully it becomes a challenge specifically if you are having issues with what Coveo does inherently while computing 'aq' for a rendering/request
One such case happened recently, where we needed a disjunction to be applied at a specific piece of generated 'aq'.  We obviously could not get away with disjunctive expressions, I talked about this in my previous blog if you are curious.

https://deepthikatta.blogspot.com/2016/11/coveo-facet-slider-across-two-fields.html


The reason why this approach would not work in this case is because the way disjunctive expression works and is interpreted by Coveo in final query is aq OR dq which means in result set you will find all items that match your filters appended by Coveo in aq OR that match your expression that you added on dq.

But, what if you want this disjunction to applied only on a particular facet or custom advanced expression.  How can we do this? is it possible?

Like always, everything is possible. :)  In our case, it is little more complex because we also did not want what Coveo typically injects as a piece of aq on a Facet Slider for example because we would fall in to same problem which we began to solve if we don't do this.   So, to achieve this, we did two steps.

1.  OR where you need - In event called buildingQuery, access the args and append the advanced expression that you need including a specific OR condition you care about.  Some thing like
 Coveo.$('#@Model.Id')
        .on("buildingQuery", function(e, args) {
            let mySlider = Coveo.$('#mySlider')
              if (mySlider != undefined) {
              let optionsOfComponent = mySlider.coveo().getSliderBoundaryForQuery()
               if (optionsOfComponent != undefined && optionsOfComponent[0] != undefined && optionsOfComponent[1] != undefined) {
                let fieldOneQuery= '@(Model.ToCoveoFieldName("field one")) >=' + optionsOfComponent[0] + ' AND @(Model.ToCoveoFieldName("field one")) <=' + optionsOfComponent[1]
                let fieldtwoQuery= '@(Model.ToCoveoFieldName("field two")) >=' + optionsOfComponent[0] + ' AND @(Model.ToCoveoFieldName("field two")) <=' + optionsOfComponent[1]
                args.queryBuilder.advancedExpression.add('((' + fieldOneQuery+ ') OR (' + fieldtwoQuery+ '))')
              }
      }

         })
2. Remove the advanced expression added by Coveo -  Reverse engineered the string that Coveo would append on the facet slider per configuration and removed it using helper provided under Expression Builder.
https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/JsSearch/ExpressionBuilder

Some thing like -
 .on("doneBuildingQuery", function(e, args)  {
   //reverse engineer the value you would like to remove and ensure you have proper checks on coveo      components or facets before you access the values
    let  expressionToRemove  = '@(Model.ToCoveoFieldName("your slider         field"))=='+optionsOfComponent[0]+'..'+optionsOfComponent[1]
    args.queryBuilder.advancedExpression.remove(expressionToRemove)
   })

That is it, we got what we needed when took a peek at Network tab and request parameters and the results matched to business goal.   One less thing to worry about.  We are launching this thing soon, totally psyched!

Coveo Computed Field based on Sitecore Parent needs additional configuration

In some of our critical pieces of implementation revolving around Coveo renderings, due to our heavy hierarchical data for SEO benefit, we had multiple situations where we were having computed fields that read a piece of data from direct or in-direct parent of the current item in question in sitecore.

It was working out perfectly, no additional load time or performance issue as indexing operation should fully load what we need on the current sitecore item.  Until!!!

Recently, I ran in to this situation where say you have the whole hierarchical data already in play, which just means we did not create a child and did not publish the current item.  But, a scenario where a field that you are reading in computed field from parent actually changed.  In this situation, due to inherent behavior of how indexing would work, the parent would be re-indexed(As that is the item that is changed and hence added to delta by Coveo).  Now, we have child having an outdated computed field which in index memory still has stale data until you force build indexes or publish the child.

In real life scenario, you would take an item through workflow, in this case parent is changed, so it would enter the Sitecore workflow and will be pushed live.  But, in our case, every time a parent changes, we want the children also to re-index, so, we do not have situation of out-of-sync data.

So, additional configuration would be needed every time you have a scenario where a computed field say depends on some other item (like parent in our case or it could be something else in the sitecore tree as well).  To address this and ensure it works as expected in ideal scenario, we need to do below steps

1.  Patch to coveoItemProcessingPipeline and add a new processor - call it say 'RelatedItemsPreProcessor'
2. Implement what happens in the processor, in our case we had to get all children and add it to List of items that Coveo re-indexes when this specific item is in delta.  Quick example below, it could be changed per your needs.  There is a basic example on Coveo documentation as well.

 public class RelatedItemsPreProcessor : IProcessor<CoveoItemProcessingPipelineArgs>
    {
        public void Process(CoveoItemProcessingPipelineArgs p_Args)
        {

            SitecoreIndexableItem indexableItem = p_Args.Item as SitecoreIndexableItem;
            if(indexableItem != null)
            {
                Item item = indexableItem.Item;
             
                if(item.TemplateID.Guid.Equals(yourguidgoeshere))
                {
                    if(item.HasChildren)
                    {
                        //Get all children using query
                        string query = string.Format("descendant - or - self::*[@@templateid = '{0}' ]", YourGUID);
                        var childrenOfItem = item.Axes.SelectItems(query);
                        if(childrenOfItem != null && childrenOfItem.Any())
                        {
                            foreach(var itm in childrenOfItem)
                            {
                                //Add the item to the output list
                                var itemToBeAdded = new SitecoreIndexableItem(itm);
                                if (!p_Args.OutputItems.Contains(itemToBeAdded))
                                    p_Args.OutputItems.Add(new SitecoreIndexableItem(itm));
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }

3.  Add this new processor in your Coveo.SearchProvider.Custom.config
<coveoItemProcessingPipeline>
        <processor type="namespace.RelatedItemsPreProcessor, Extensions" />
      </coveoItemProcessingPipeline>


That is it! Post this simple steps, I can be rest assured that our data integrity would be in place post the workflow is implemented.  It is really easy to miss this in your implementation when most of your users are logging in using admin credentials for example and probably publishing sub-items every time they publish a change.  Keep an eye open for these kind of situations.

Review pipeline's available here  https://developers.coveo.com/display/public/SitecoreV3/Understanding+the+Indexing+and+Search+Pipelines;jsessionid=814B71D25E05C8684E2C029CEC416070

When you need more than filtered results

Recently, in one of our major Coveo renderings, there was a splurge of new requirements.  Well, no huge surprise there I think.  When powerful people meet in the same room, new ideas do come by, not such a good news to us developers who have scratched their brains and pulled up hours to wrap up the initial implementation.  Although, I believe it is a good venue when time is on your side to learn something new. :)
This is exactly what happened to us, the requirement sounds pretty simple, but took me few hours to find an optimum solution which solves the problem, but, also would not involve too many changes to existing logic in play.
Goal -   Get all the results that match the filters(facets) selected by end user with out the default pagination applied (Coveo has default pagination and only pulls the values entered in Number of results value given on the rendering properties).   After few hours of going over Coveo documentation, I found something though completely not the same as what I was looking for, it kind of sparked the similar wave of implementation.
I almost always start a Q&A either to confirm my thoughts or to see if there are any other ways to accomplish the same.   In this case, what i was going for just felt right and Coveo team member confirmed the same.  You can follow the trail here.

https://answers.coveo.com/questions/10368/do-we-have-allnot-limited-to-resultsperpage-result.html

So, basically to achieve what I was looking for, you need to fire a parallel query with exact same filters based on user interaction and simply change the results to an upper bound.  It would have been nice to actually set it to Totalresults, I have not tried that, but, could work when you get the value from the correct variable.

Here is a snippet -

Coveo.$('#<%= Model.Id %>').on(Coveo.QueryEvents.querySuccess,function(e, args){
  var query = args.query;
   query.numberOfResults = 2;
//Do any other modifications on the query
Coveo.SearchEndpoint.endpoints["default"].search(query).done(function(data) {
//do any other logic on the data up here
}
 });
});

That is it, we have everything we need plus a handler over all results.  I am pretty sure it would come up often hopefully it helps any one else.

Happy problem solving folks. :)