Sitecore Symposium & MVP Summit 2017 - Las Vegas

This years (2017) Sitecore Symposium was at The Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas which was attended by around 3000 Sitecore customers/partners/employees. (https://www.sitecore.net/events/symposium-2017/introduction.aspx). Sitecore Symposium is the main event of the year organized by Sitecore.

Sitecore was generous to provide all the Sitecore MVPs who attended the Sitecore Symposium with a chance to take newest Sitecore 9 Certification examination for free.

I was also able to do the online Sitecore 9 course and take the certification examination at the Symposium. And got pass with 98% pass mark for the examination, highest marks with few other MVPs from the first batch of people who took Sitecore 9 certification.

After attending the Sitecore Symposium, Sitecore MVP Summit started. Sitecore MVP Summit is the event organized by Sitecore to provide insights into Sitecore product and future plans to Sitecore MVPs. This was one and half-day event which also organized at The Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas.

After keynotes by Sitecore product teams, we attended the Sitecore MVP party which was organized at the TopGolf at Las Vegas. It was a fun event.

Overall, it was fun week with lot of knowledge sharing and also meeting all the Sitecore community friends.


Until next Sitecore Symposium & MVP Summit, Happy Sitecore !!

Sitecore 9 Admin Tool to View Config Layers & Config Roles

With the latest release of Sitecore 9, Sitecore has introduced lots of good changes to config file patching. These includes categorizing configurations to Configuration Layers & Configuration Roles.

+Kamruz Jaman has written a great blog post on what are these new changes here

With these new additional configuration patching options, it might be bit difficult to track which configs are patch to which Configuration Layers OR which Configuration Role.

But not to worry.

Sitecore has provide a new Sitecore admin tool, Showconfiglayers.aspx, which will allow you to view the configurations filter by Configuration Layers, Configuration Roles or any combination of those.

For example, if you have selected following options and click on the "click to see result configuration" link, a new webpage will be open with showconfig.aspx file with the selected filters added as query string parameters.

http://sc900rev170622/sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx?layer=Modules|Custom&role=Standalone

Also, it support custom configuration roles also, by allowing you to add those into filters. 

Just type the custom role into text box and click "Add role" button. 

As I mention earlier, this new showconfiglayers.aspx file will open showconfig.aspx file with those selected Config layers & config roles added as query string parameters. So, most easiest way is to directly type those parameters into good old showconfig.aspx admin tool url, which should provide you with the same results.

http://sc900rev170622/sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx?layer=Modules&role=CustomRole

UPDATE : 05/11/2017There is an official documentation regarding the same topic which I found today, you can refer it from following url
https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/developing/developing_with_sitecore/customizing_server_configuration/view_configuration_changes

Happy Sitecore!!

Validate Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers Telephone field for Length

I know Sitecore Web Forms for Marketers module will be deprecated with Sitecore 9 release, with the introduction of Sitecore Forms module.

Nevertheless I thought to write a quick post on a recent simple issue that I had to try and find a solution for.

In one of my current projects, I had to add a length validation to Telephone field in WFFM form.

So, I just added another validation to Telephone field definition item in WFFM (see Image-1).

Image-1 : Adding "count chars" validation to Telephone field

Then I tested the form. Even thought validation worked, it was considering 0 as Minimum Length & 256 as Maximum Length of that field value. There were the default values define for Single-line text field class in Sitecore.

Even though we can see Minimum Length & Maximum Length fields for WFFM Single-line text field (see in image-2), WFFM Design interface for Telephone field does NOT display any Minimum Length & Maximum Length field (see image-3).

Image-2 : WFFM Single-line Text Field Design Interface

Image-3 : WFFM Telephone Field Design Interface

But, If you look at the Telephone field definition in WFFM (see Image-4), you can see it is using "Sitecore.Forms.Mvc.ViewModels.Fields.TelephoneField,Sitecore.Forms.Mvc".

Image-4 : Telephone Field Definition Item

So, once I looked into the code base for that class by decoding the Sitecore.Forms.Mvc.dll, I could see it was extending the Single-line text field class (see Image-5)

Image-5 : TelephoneField Class

So, as you know, SingleLineTextField is created to use Maximum Length & Minimum Length properties.

Finally, to get these length validations to work, all I had to do is add following parameters to "Parameters" field of that Telephone field item (see Image-6)

<MinLength>10</MinLength><MaxLength>15</MaxLength>

That was it. After that, Telephone field validation works as I needed with 10 characters as Minimum Length and 15 characters as Maximum length.

Hope this helps to someone ! :-)