Sitecore Media Library Performance Optimization Checklist

Here is a quick checklist that you can use in order to get more performance out of your Sitecore Media Library’s delivery.

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Windows Authentication for Sitecore. Repost

Back in 08 I posted this walkthrough on how to configure Sitecore to use Windows Authentication for SQL connection and effectively remove the username and password from the connectionStrings.config file.
Here is a quick repost of the walkthrough with a few tweaks for SQL 2008 / Windows 2008 (R2) and Sitecore 6.4.x/6.5 (some steps are not required any more):

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Get all published items in Sitecore 6.1/6.2

You may need to get all items that were processes by a publishing operation for different reasons, for example, pull certain information for each item and notify CDN of a change so cache could be purged. AKAMAI can be configured to behave that way.
Currently we have two articles on the subject. This one describes how to use the PublishEngine, second article suggests approach with custom PublishLog. Both are not compatible with 6.x. So I’ve looked into the options for the latest Sitecore with tech support. Our findings included introduction of a new PublishProcessor which examines the Queue property of PublishContext, but this did not work properly for smart publishing and I wanted a bulletproof yet simple approach applicable to all possible publishing modes.
Then I remembered that we are already doing similar things for indexing. The update index job processes only changed items and gets that information from the History storage.

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Ways to check field type in code

As a “safe check” code operation in Sitecore, you frequently check for expected field type before working with a field.

While there is an easy way to do it via “Type” property of a field returning string, it may not look really nice and considered hard-coding:

if (Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["featured"].Type == "Droplink")

Plus backwards compatibility of such code is questionable.

 

I suggest you use the Sitecore.Data.Fields.FieldTypeManager class that has “GetField” method where you can pass the instance of your field and use “IS” keyword to check if it is safe to cast:

if (FieldTypeManager.GetField(Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["title"]) is TextField)

if (FieldTypeManager.GetField(Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["text"]) is HtmlField)

if (FieldTypeManager.GetField(Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["featured"]) is LookupField)

if (FieldTypeManager.GetField(Sitecore.Context.Item.Fields["metakeywords"]) is MultilistField)

Just make sure to replace the field name strings with a reference to a GUID class and you will be all set!

Department Based Workflow

This applies to version 5.3.x but also can be used with the latest Sitecore 6. Imagine a scenario when you have a multisite or a department-based content tree with micro-sites or department sections sharing the same data template definitions. For example, we have the “Articles” section defined in the both “US” and “France” micro-sites. The articles as items have the same set of fields, in other words, these items are created from the same data template. Also, there is an absolute requirement is to have different workflows assigned to different instances of the articles. For example, for the articles created inside of the “France” micro-site, the workflow will consist of three states and have a unique set of workflow actions and possibly different security. For the “US” articles, the whole workflow configuration will be different.

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