Saturday, February 28, 2015

Capabilities of Sitecore - February Meetup - Sitecore User Group Sri Lanka - Event Report

Our February Meetup was held on Wednesday, 11th February 2015.
This time, our topic was "Capabilities of Sitecore".

This time, our presenter was Mr. Matthew Tilbury. He is one of the directors at Codehouse Ltd and has a long standing relationship with Sitecore. He is also an expert on how to use Sitecore to enhance the customer experience in web sites as well as marketing.

Matthew did a great demonstration using own Codehouse website.

Some of the topics that he did includes,


  • Quick look into using Content Editor & Page Editor
  • How to use Personalization to improve visitor experience
  • Engagement Plans, Goals, Engagement Values, etc
  • Quick look into ECM


Our schedule was as follows

6:00 PM - 7:15 PM  - Capabilities of Sitecore by Matthew Tilbury & Q&A Session
7:15 PM - 8:00 PM  - Networking



This event turns out to be a great one with most of the participants are requesting more event in the future meetups.

Sitecore development in Sri Lanka is growing rapidly with three companies schedule to start Sitecore development in coming months. As SUGSL, we are very happy to contribute to Sri Lanka Sitecore community.

Hope to see you all in our next Meetup!

Friday, February 20, 2015

Common Domain field value change error - Sitecore EXM 3.0 Bug


When try to change "Common Domain" field value on /sitecore/content/home/email campaign item, it returns following error


Sitecore Version : 8.0 rev.150121
Email Experience Manager 3.0.0 rev. 150126

I tried this on a fresh installtion (with fresh sitecore and EXM) and it returned the same error.

So, Ticket is created to sitecore support (431963) and it was reported as a bug. They provide the following workaround

1. Open the \Website\sitecore modules\Shell\EmailCampaign\UI\Dialogs\SelectDomain.xaml.xml file;
2. Add the EnableViewState="false" attribute to the <EmailCampaign.SelectDomain> node:
<EmailCampaign.SelectDomain x:inherits="Sitecore.Modules.EmailCampaign.UI.Dialogs.SelectDomainPage,Sitecore.EmailCampaign" EnableViewState="false">
3. Restart IIS.

and Workaround fixed the issue.

Hope this will help someone!

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Publishing and Link DB Rebuild error after upgrading to Sitecore 8.0

Recently, we run an upgrade test for our environment to sitecore 8.0 update-1.
After the upgrade, when we try to publish items in /home node, it returns following error
(When try to rebuild the link database for master, we are getting an error.)

13384 13:48:46 ERROR Exception
Exception: System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException
Message: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
Source: mscorlib
   at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethod(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, Boolean constructor)
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.UnsafeInvokeInternal(Object obj, Object[] parameters, Object[] arguments)
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
   at System.Reflection.MethodBase.Invoke(Object obj, Object[] parameters)
   at (Object , Object[] )
   at Sitecore.Pipelines.CorePipeline.Run(PipelineArgs args)
   at Sitecore.Jobs.Job.ThreadEntry(Object state)

Nested Exception

Exception: System.FormatException
Message: Unrecognized Guid format.
Source: mscorlib
   at System.Guid.GuidResult.SetFailure(ParseFailureKind failure, String failureMessageID, Object failureMessageFormatArgument, String failureArgumentName, Exception innerException)
   at System.Guid.TryParseGuid(String g, GuidStyles flags, GuidResult& result)
   at System.Guid..ctor(String g)
   at Sitecore.Analytics.Data.TrackingField.<>c__DisplayClass21.<get_Events>b__20(XElement e)
  ......



TEMP SOLUTION :
We try to find the items that return an error when published, and deleted them and recreated them. Then, everything start to work again including publishing and linkDB rebuild.

SOLUTION :
Sitecore support get back to us and gave the reason for these issue.
Following are a summary of there reason and solution.

In Sitecore 6.5 Update-4 there was a change exactly related to the format how Tracking field stores data. See ref. 358378 in Release Notes (http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%206/ReleaseNotes/ChangeLog/Release%20History%20SC65.aspx).

Please review "Tracking" field of these items - it contained incorrect definition of page events. You can simply clear tracking field content for these items and reassign page event if needed.

Execute something like following query on Master database

select * from SharedFields where FieldId = '{B0A67B2A-8B07-4E0B-8809-69F751709806}' and Value not like '%{________-____-____-____-____________}%' and Value like 'event'

Such query returned values to verify - where 'id' attribute was missed.