Sitecore Support: Help us help you!

Greetings,
Quite an unusual post from me today. I spent last week working on a few support issues via the helpdesk, and must say, I enjoyed being so close to the customer and partners. I’ve been doing this for more than 5 years now and still remember the fun old days where we had email based support and a shared spreadsheet with the tickets. But we’ve come long ways, and product support is no exception. In April, actually, we hit a record of 859 support tickets filed by our customers and partners across the globe. That’s no walk in the park!

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Sitecore Friendly URLs and plus sign

One of the customers recently asked about using the plus sign in URLs, for example: http://localhost/news+events.aspx

There are at least two ways to accomplish this:
1. Allow “+” in item name via a configuration change
For this you will need to adjust the regular expression in the “ItemNameValidation” setting in web.config and make sure + sign is not  present in the “InvalidItemNameChars” setting.
2. Rely on the display name instead.

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Better Know Sitecore: Preventing multiple messages of the same type in the log

I would like to start a series of blog posts titled “Better Know Sitecore” where I will cover those areas of the product that are on on the surface, for example, useful utility methods that can save you time, efficient development techniques, etc.

Today we are covering the “Sitecore.Diagnostics” namespace, specifically, the “Log” class which most of you used for logging.
Recently discovered method of this class “SingleError” can be used when you would like to log only one instance of a specific error, not more than that. For example, we used it when trying to get a template for an item. If a template is not found or invalid, we don’t want to output it more than once. Under the hood, there is a caching mechanism in place that checks if the same error message is already in the collection – skip it, otherwise call the “Error” method.

Thanks goes to Sergey for clarifying it.

Happy logging!

Quick tip: resolving section sort order problem with inheritance

There is a known issue currently with the sort order set on the standard values for the “/sitecore/templates/System/Templates/Template section” template and not being picked correctly and always treated as zero until you set the sort order specifically for the section thus overriding the standard value.

This has impact on section inheritance, producing unexpected behavior in the following case:
1. You have an abstract “base product” template with the following sections:

2. You have a derivative template “monitor” with its own domain specific data section:

3. You want to have certain sections from the “base product” template show up first, then the “data” section from the “monitor” template itself, then the rest of sections from base:
 

Since the default inherited sort order for a section is 100 (coming from __Standard values), however you won’t be able to accomplish this by setting the sort order of “descriptors” and “product data” section to 80 and 90 correspondingly.
This is because the value for the section sort order that is coming from the __Standard values will always be considered as zero.

There is an easy and simple way to solve this by simply setting the sort order of “descriptors” and “product data” sections to negative values (-2 and -1) for example.

Enjoy!