Sitecore – Breaking changes when using the Solr ContentSearch provider in Sitecore 10.1+

Within the past few days my main focus was upgrading a solution from Sitecore 9.2, to Sitecore 10.2. I didn’t have any struggles and the upgrade was pretty smooth, until the client started testing the search behaviour. Apparently Sitecore introduced a breaking change within Sitecore 10.1, that changes the way that queries with Contains are …

Sitecore – Speeding up the upgrade process for the Reference Data Database

When you’re upgrading from Sitecore 9.2 to any higher versions, then there have been major changes in the setup of the Reference Data database. Within 9.2 and lower, there was a seperate table for the DefinitionMonikers, while in higher versions this table is merged with the Definintions itself. Depending on the amount of records within …

Sitecore – An explanation of the XDB databases

When Sitecore 9 was introduced, a new way of storing contact data called XDB was introduced. XDB which is short for the Experience Database, stores all the data related to contacts, such as interactions, contacts and their related facets. To support a large intake and retention of data, Sitecore chose to use sharded databases, which …

Sitecore – Configuring retries (defers) for the message bus

Sitecore has abstractions built in to make use of the message bus functionality which is implemented with Rebus. There’s a great post from Volodymyr how to use this functionality within your own Sitecore solution. I wanted to make sure my messages were retried several times, as I’m calling an external API which isn’t available from …

Sitecore – Server side evaluation of Sitecore Forms conditions

In my previous post i’ve described how you can bypass the Sitecore Forms validation, and a workaround to solve the problem. This workaround however breaks the conditional required fields which are the fields that will be hidden or shown depending on the conditions that you can configure on a field. The conditions are evaluated only …

Sitecore – Resharding your XDB databases

Sitecore is great in collecting data; an insane amount of data. The XDB data that Sitecore collects is stored within the XDB Shard databases. These databases contain everything about contacts, their interactions and their facets. When you have Sitecore running for a while, you’ll see these databases grow. Out of the box there’s nothing that …

Sitecore SXA – Creating a proper fallback for the og:title element

SXA is a great product and comes with opengraph support out of the box, you can define the following opengraph fields on every page: Title Description Image Type Site name Admins App Id All opengraph fields will not be outputted as HTML tags when they’re empty, except for the Title field. Sitecore uses the Sitecore.XA.Feature.SiteMetadata.Repositories.OpenGraphMetadata.OpenGraphMetadataRepository …