SUGCON 2018 - Sitecore User group conference in Berlin

The Sitecore User Group Conference (SUGCON) is getting bigger and better every year. The 2018 edition in Berlin was definitely a success. The sessions were great. We had plenty of good food and drinks - not enough tables but that made us join and meet new people (or bump into old acquaintances) which brings me to the most important part, the attendees: 600 awesome Sitecore community people that make this conference to the annual high mass for all Sitecore users, developers, marketers, .... With a 'little' help of an amazing group of organizers (also community people) who did a tremendous job putting this all together.

A warm applause for the community and a big thanks for the organizers!

Day 1 sessions

Day 1 started with an opening keynote, highlighting three community pilars (Sitecore community forum - Sitecore Slack - Sitecore StackExchange) and a surprise announcement on Sitecore's release cadence. From now on Sitecore will release:

• a "Software release" twice a year with new features
• "Update releases" with fixes but no breaking changes when needed. 

Jason Wilkerson and Richard Seal got the conference really started with a trip to "SitecoreLand". A fictive amusement park with bracelets, fast lanes, and a Sitecore driven website and mobile app. They used the whole Sitecore spectrum: SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator), Sitecore Commerce, Marketing automation and xConnect with a special sauce of IoT (Internet of Things) to accomplish a proof of concept for an all-in customer experience. It was a call to all of us to dream.. to use our imagination..  because lots of things are possible.

Kam Figy went on stage to show us "Uber-modern API's for Sitecore". The rabbit out of his hat (can a Unicorn wear a hat?) was called GraphQL. This is all still in preview, but the demo's were cool (and working). He showed the graph browser, an alternative database browser and the integration in JSS. It was amazing, overwhelming, cool, and a little bit "wtf".. (but javascript is not my usual playground).

Next on stage was Alexei Veshalovich. He showed us an omni-channel demo for an unrecognizable car brand using (amongst others) Outlook Plugin, Xamarin, and from the Sitecore platform JSS, ExM, xConnect and the Marketing automation engine. And still no angry demo gods :)

My next session was Commerce minded: Sumith Damodaran presented the architecture of the new Sitecore Commerce 9 platform with an emphasis on plugins.

We learned about inventory sets and sellable items, the storage roles and the application roles like Shops, Authoring and Minions. Commerce Plugins are a (or the) way to extend and enhance the solution, knowing that the product itself also implements it's core features via plugins. And a final note on SXA Storefront for building B2C e-commerce solutions using Sitecore Experience Accelerator.

Evening entertainment

Sugcon is also the place where the award ceremony for the Sitecore Hackathon and the MVP's take place.

For the first time the hackathon results were not announced up front, so the tension with the participants was a little higher when Akshay Sura presented the winners. As our team had to withdraw due to illness 😞 we didn't renew our title but we're still proud to see our name -No Weekend 4 Us- on the slide with past winners. But: congratulations to all 2018 winners! We know they did an amazing job. And thanks to Akshay and all judges for investing their time to make this happen!

During the MVP ceremony the many mvp's, who spend quite some time making the Sitecore community as good as it is, are being celebrated and their physical award is handed out. And of course, this is picture time.

The entertainment this year was a "Community Feud" with Akshay Sura and Robin Hermanussen as show hosts and Pete Navarra and Jason St-Cyr as team captains.

It was fun.. and our team (with Pete as captain) won - the prize money was donated to the non-profit Girls in Tech. The questions and answers were based upon a questionaire filled in by community members some time ago. "What drink would Pieter Brinkman and Mark Frost have in a pub?" - I think Pete learned that we have quite some trolls, as "water" was a top answer 🙊

Day 2 sessions

Day 2 started with two Honorary MVP's (Todd Mitchell & Lars Petersen) showing us the power of connected data - how to bring all sorts of data in xDB through xConnect and get it out again in a meaningful way. Amongst others they used a calculated facet as a way to capture data instead of keeping and counting a number of events.

For my next session I had the heartbreaking choice between the "EXM Live!" session by the magnificant Pete Navarra or the xConnect evolution by xDB guru Dmytro Shevchenko.

I decided to go for Dmytro and the underlying mechanics of Sitecore's new scalable architecture. This means I will have to watch Pete in Orlando ;) The xConnect session was interesting and a good follow-up of the session of last year. The differences between the locking mechanism in Sitecore 8 and 9 was explained - we went from pessimistic to optimistic - and code was shown to handle this. We're looking forward to Dmytro's posts on this ;)

Thomas Eldblom went on the main stage to give his last session as Sitecore employee (as we would learn later 😞).  

Using SIF -the Sitecore Install Framework- live on stage installing several Sitecore architectures might be a challenge but he was well prepared and the demo's went very smooth. He showed the different setups provided by Sitecore and how to tweak SIF to install the ones that are not out-of-the-box. Even installing modules like the Publishing Service can be done with SIF.

As I missed Mark Stiles' session on cognitive services last year, I decided to join it now. It was a good overview of what companies like Google and Microsoft are offering on AI and how this can be leveraged. It made me curious to see where this is going:

I don't think Mikkel Rømer expected so many people in his "White hat hacker's guide to the internet". The break-out room was fully packed and heard that he tested 3K+ Sitecore sites on some known issues like the Telerik and the PushSession vulnerabilities and faulty configurations like open logins with or without the default password. As the results were quite astonishing - meaning too many sites were not ok - this was an eye opener for a lot of people. Patch your solutions! Read and act by the hardening guides! And to be honest, I'm not sure if I was worried most by his results or by the questions afterwards as some of those made clear there is still a lot of work to make all developers aware of security risks... 

Up to George Chang to give us some thoughts on Identity in Sitecore 9.

The new Federated Authentication feature in Sitecore 9 looks very good. I already read some blog posts on it and this session confirmed my feelings. Quite sure I will be trying this one out in the near future.

Back to the the main stage for two well-known community trolls telling us the story behind the new Forms: Kamruz Jaman and Mike Reynolds (or was it Reybolds?). I must admit I had expected a bit more customizations and code but that might be because I already saw quite a bit about Forms already (and presented a session on this topic myself on the local user group). But the session was a good overview of the features, the possibilities and the missing pieces of a Sitecore module that a lot of users have been waiting for. And.. they managed to get all of us on Slack -during the session (so I might have missed a bit)- by posting Forms data on Slack:

The last session slot was for Sitecore's X-team -represented by Alex Shyba & Adam Weber- to demonstrate the current status of the Sitecore Javascript Services (JSS). Heavy stuff after 2 days of conference...

Pieter Brinkman had the honour to close the conference and announce the next Sugcon Europe: mark April 4th/5th 2019 in your agenda and start learning English because the community is going to London (in Brexit-country).

Final thoughts

Sugcon is truly the place and time to meet all those wonderful community members you got to know online in real life. Have a chat with the guy (or girl) who helped you solve an issue, or vice versa. Meet the people behind the modules you might be using. Sadly -as I am used to arriving the evening before the conference and leaving right after- it's too short to meet you all so I surely missed quite a few people. Let's catch up in Orlando ;)  

But still it was good to see some old and new prominent SSE folks (good to wear your 5K-shirt, Chris), people I've worked with in the past, people I will work with in the near future... many known faces from Belgium (SugBelux), and (un)known faces from all around the globe.

Thanks to all organizers for creating this opportunity for the tremendous Sitecore community to meet and learn in person. Hey, we are omni-channel! 

Sitecore 9 configuration roles: content management, reporting, processing

Sitecore 9 configuration roles

A while ago I had to setup a few Sitecore servers with a topology as:

• Content Delivery
• Content Management (and all the rest)

In Sitecore 9 things have changed a little bit when setting up server roles. As we could read in the documention we have these roles at our disposal:

• ContentDelivery
• ContentManagement
• Processing
• Reporting
• Standalone

For our CD server, the choice was easy: we set the server to the ContentDelivery role.

For our CM server, it was not that obvious. As the documentation mentioned combining roles is possible and it even mentions "ContentManagement, Processing, Reporting" as an example we though this would be a good idea. 

ContentManagement, Processing, Reporting

Unfortunately immediately after setting these roles, the server crashed. We noticed that we had to set remote settings for processing and reporting server which seemed very weird as our processing and reporting was not remote. 

I ended up asking this on SSE and also to Sitecore Support. Support logged this as a bug and gave us the solution - details on this can be found on SSE, so no need to copy them here.

With these changes, we had no need to set any remote settings. And the site worked!

But a few wise men asked me: "why are you doing this?". The only answer I had at that time was: "because I can"..  which is maybe not the best answer when explaining a server setup :)

Standalone

Before Sitecore 9 and the configuration roles we would have had a setup for this CM server that is now similar to a Standalone. Because that was easy. And disabling and enabling files was not...

So why not use standalone role now? Well, we assumed that as this server is not a content delivery one we would benefit from defining the roles. But just assuming is as wicked as using roles just because you can...

Compare configs

So let's compare the resulting configs.

There were quite some differences actually. I won't go into all the details as that is probably just boring but let's focus on some main points: [SO = standalone, CMPR = ContentManagement,Processing,Reporting]

• databases: in a SO setup, core and master are set as default databases, in a CMPR setup these are all set to web
• tracking: in a CMPR setup entries are removed regarding RobotDetection, form dropouts, session commits, content testing,..  
• EXM: a lot of entries removed in CMPR, especially on tracking

So without going into details, I would assume that when not running in Standalone the website running on the ContentManagement server might not be doing your tracking and testing correctly and if entrying from a mail you'll also miss out.

But.. is this important? Will it make the server more performant? 

I think not. 

So what do you need to do? Well, you have a choice..  Also consider if you are using the server as a true test environment (using an extra publishing target perhaps) you probably do want ContentDelivery enabled, meaning a standalone setup.

The easy choice is: set it to standalone.

But.. if you would have separate Processing and/or Reporting roles, would you add ContentDelivery as a role to the ContentManagement server? Probably/maybe not.. so why do that when those roles get combined?

Because it's easy... :)

via GIPHY

Displaying extra data on a Sitecore 9 Goal

Goals in Sitecore 9

In our project we had goals set when a whitepaper was downloaded. This works fine, but it would be much nicer if we could show which whitepaper was actually downloaded. All the whitepapers have an identifier code, so the challenge was to add this identifier to the goal data.

Capturing custom goal data

Capturing the data is very well explained in the official documentation of Sitecore. We used the "Data" and "DataKey" properties of the goal:

• DataKey: a key that identifies the contents of  "Data" - e.g. 'Whitepaper code'
• Data : any data collected as part of triggering the event - in our case the whitepaper identifier

This all works fine and we can see the data in the database (xDB shards) as part of the events.

Displaying custom goal data

Data is nice, but you need a way to show it. It wasn't immediatly clear how to do this, so I asked it on Sitecore Stack Exchange.

Working on #Sitecore #xConnect customizations and Experience Profile goodies, resulting in a blog post on displaying contact facets https://t.co/61IDBzCV5l and a question on displaying goal data https://t.co/YMx41X2beM

— Gert Gullentops (@Gatagordo) February 5, 2018

Jarmo Jarvi pointed me in the good direction by mentioning a tremendous blog post by Jonathan Robbins. The blog post was based on Sitecore 8 - the idea behind my post here is to show the differences when doing this in Sitecore 9 and xConnect. The result will be the same:

an extra column in the goals section of the activity tab of a contact in the Experience Profile

ExperienceProfileContactViews

The ExperienceProfileContactViews pipeline is where all the magic happens. Adding the extra column to the results table is identical to the description for Sitecore 8. Fetching the data (in GetGoals) however is quite different as we have to use xConnect now:

public class AddGoalDataColumn : ReportProcessorBase
{
  public override void Process(ReportProcessorArgs args)
  {
    args.ResultTableForView?.Columns.Add(Schema.GoalData.ToColumn());
  }
}

public static class Schema
{
  public static ViewField GoalData = new ViewField("GoalData");
}

public class FillGoalData : ReportProcessorBase
{
  public override void Process(ReportProcessorArgs args)
  {
    var resultTableForView = args.ResultTableForView;
    Assert.IsNotNull(resultTableForView, "Result table for {0} could not be found.", args.ReportParameters.ViewName);
    var i = 0;
    foreach (var row in resultTableForView.AsEnumerable())
    {
      var goalData = args.QueryResult.Rows[i].ItemArray[4];
      if (goalData != null)
      {
        row[Schema.GoalData.Name] = goalData;
      }

      i++;
    }
  }
}

public class GetGoals : ReportProcessorBase
{
  public override void Process(ReportProcessorArgs args)
  {
    var goalsDataXconnect = GetGoalsDataXconnect(args.ReportParameters.ContactId);
    args.QueryResult = goalsDataXconnect;
  }

  private static DataTable GetGoalsDataXconnect(Guid contactId)
  {
    var goalsTableWithSchema = CreateGoalsTableWithSchema();
    var contactExpandOptions = new ContactExpandOptions(Array.Empty<string>())
    {
      Interactions = new RelatedInteractionsExpandOptions("WebVisit")
      {
        StartDateTime = DateTime.MinValue
      }
    };

    FillRawTable(GetContactByOptions(contactId, contactExpandOptions).Interactions.Where(p => p.Events.OfType<Goal>().Any()), goalsTableWithSchema);
    return goalsTableWithSchema;
  }

  private static DataTable CreateGoalsTableWithSchema()
  {
    var dataTable = new DataTable();
    dataTable.Columns.AddRange(new[]
    {
      new DataColumn("_id", typeof(Guid)),
      new DataColumn("ContactId", typeof(Guid)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_PageEvents_PageEventDefinitionId", typeof(Guid)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_PageEvents_DateTime", typeof(DateTime)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_PageEvents_Data", typeof(string)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_Url_Path", typeof(string)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_Url_QueryString", typeof(string)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_PageEvents_Value", typeof(int)),
      new DataColumn("Pages_Item__id", typeof(Guid)),
      new DataColumn("SiteName", typeof(string))
    });

    return dataTable;
  }

  private static void FillRawTable(IEnumerable<Interaction> goalsInteractions, DataTable rawTable)
  {
    foreach (var goalsInteraction in goalsInteractions)
    {
      foreach (var goal in goalsInteraction.Events.OfType<Goal>())
      {
        var currentEvent = goal;
        var row = rawTable.NewRow();
        row["_id"] = goalsInteraction.Id;
        row["ContactId"] = goalsInteraction.Contact.Id;
        row["Pages_PageEvents_PageEventDefinitionId"] = currentEvent.DefinitionId;
        row["Pages_PageEvents_DateTime"] = currentEvent.Timestamp;
        row["Pages_PageEvents_Data"] = currentEvent.Data;
        row["Pages_PageEvents_Value"] = currentEvent.EngagementValue;
        var dataRow = row;
        const string index = "SiteName";
        var webVisit = goalsInteraction.WebVisit();
        var str = webVisit?.SiteName ?? string.Empty;
        dataRow[index] = str;
        if (currentEvent.ParentEventId.HasValue)
        {
          if (goalsInteraction.Events.FirstOrDefault(p => p.Id == currentEvent.ParentEventId.Value) is PageViewEvent pageViewEvent)
          {
            row["Pages_Item__id"] = pageViewEvent.ItemId;
            var urlString = new UrlString(pageViewEvent.Url);
            row["Pages_Url_Path"] = urlString.Path;
            row["Pages_Url_QueryString"] = urlString.Query;
          }
        }

        rawTable.Rows.Add(row);
      }
    }
  }

  private static Contact GetContactByOptions(Guid contactId, ExpandOptions options = null)
  {
    using (var client = SitecoreXConnectClientConfiguration.GetClient())
    {
      if (options == null)
      {
        options = new ContactExpandOptions(Array.Empty<string>())
        {
          Interactions = new RelatedInteractionsExpandOptions("IpInfo", "WebVisit")
        };
      }

      var contactReference = new ContactReference(contactId);
      var contact = client.Get(contactReference, options);
      if (contact == null)
      {
        throw new ContactNotFoundException($"No Contact with id [{contactId}] found");
      }

      return contact;
    }
  }
}

One more change is the configuration. It is almost the same as in Sitecore 8, but we don't need to change the goals-query anymore - instead we have to patch the GetGoals in the same ExperienceProfileContactViews pipeline.

<sitecore>
  <pipelines>
    <group groupName="ExperienceProfileContactViews">
      <pipelines>
        <goals>
          <processor patch:after="*[@type='Sitecore.Cintel.Reporting.Contact.Goal.Processors.ConstructGoalsDataTable, Sitecore.Cintel']"
             type="MyNamespace.AddGoalDataColumn, MyProject" />
          <processor patch:after="*[@type='Sitecore.Cintel.Reporting.Contact.Goal.Processors.PopulateGoalsWithXdbData, Sitecore.Cintel']"
             type="MyNamespace.FillGoalData, MyProject" />
          <processor patch:instead="*[@type='Sitecore.Cintel.Reporting.ReportingServerDatasource.Goals.GetGoals, Sitecore.Cintel']"
             type="MyNamespace.GetGoals, MyProject" />
        </goals>
      </pipelines>
    </group>
  </pipelines>
</sitecore>

Final step - core database

As Jonathan mentioned, we do need to add a new item in the core database to display our new column in the list of Goals. Create this item under the path /sitecore/client/Applications/ExperienceProfile/Contact/PageSettings/Tabs/Activity/Activity Subtabs/Goals/GoalsPanel/Goals and set a descriptive HeaderText and a DataField value that matches the schema name.

Your result should look like this:

I woud like to thank Jonathan Robbins for his original blog post and Jarmo Jarvi for his answer on SSE.

Display custom contact facets in Sitecore 9 Experience Profile

Custom contact facets

Creating custom facets is something that pops up quite often when customers start using Sitecore xDB and contact data. Sitecore 9 changed lots of things for developers working with xDB. The new xConnect layer is a wonderfull thing but when upgrading to Sitecore 9, the odds that you will need to rewrite some/all your code regarding xDB are not looking good.

Although.. you might/should see this as an opportunity to re-think what has been implemented before.

I want to focus on one particular part in this post. We had some custom facets implemented. Doing this with xConnect in Sitecore 9 is well documented on the official Sitecore documentation site.

Experience Profile

But when you have custom facets you usually also want to display this information in the Experience Profile. We used to do this based on some blog post from Adam Conn and/or Jonathan Robbins.
When upgrading to Sitecore 9, we had to made some small changes to this code. Especially (and obviously) the part where we actually do a query to fetch the data from xDB.

Contact View pipeline

As you can read in the previously mentioned blog posts the contact view pipeline is where alle the magic happens in 3 steps:

1. Creating a data structure to hold the results of the query
2. Executing the query
3. Populating the data structure with the results of the query

The part where our changes are located can be found in the execution phase. Our processor will be in a pipeline referred to by a build-in Sitecore processor:

<group groupName="ExperienceProfileContactDataSourceQueries">
  <pipelines>
    <my-custom-query>
      <processor type="MyNamespace.MyDataProcessor, MyNamespace" />
    </my-custom-query>
  </pipelines>
</group>

<group groupName="ExperienceProfileContactViews">
<pipelines>
  <demo>
    ...
    <processor type="Sitecore.Cintel.Reporting.Processors.ExecuteReportingServerDatasourceQuery, Sitecore.Cintel">
      <param desc="queryName">my-custom-query</param>
    </processor>
    ...
  </demo>
</pipelines>
</group>

Let's focus on getting the data.

Query Pipeline Processors

The query pipeline processor is the part that executes the query - gets the data. It is (still) a processor based on ReportProcessorBase.

We will be using the model that was created with the custom facet. For the example we have:

• custom facet: "CustomFacet"
• property "Company" in this facet (type string)

The code for MyNamespace.MyDataProcessor:

public override void Process(ReportProcessorArgs args)
{
  var table = CreateTableWithSchema();
  GetTableFromContact(table, args.ReportParameters.ContactId);
  args.QueryResult = table;
}

private static DataTable CreateTableWithSchema()
{
  var dataTable = new DataTable() { Locale = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture };
  dataTable.Columns.AddRange(new[]
  {
    new DataColumn(XConnectFields.Contact.Id, typeof(Guid)),
    new DataColumn("Custom_Company", typeof(string))
  });

  return dataTable;
}

private static void GetTableFromContact(DataTable rawTable, Guid contactId)
{
  string[] facets = { CustomFacet.DefaultFacetKey };
  var contact = GetContact(contactId, facets);
  var row = rawTable.NewRow();
  row[XConnectFields.Contact.Id] = contactId;

  if (contact.Facets.TryGetValue(CustomFacet.DefaultFacetKey, out var customFacet))
  {
    row["Custom_Company"] = ((CustomFacet)customFacet)?.Company;
  }

  rawTable.Rows.Add(row);
}

private static Contact GetContact(Guid contactId, string[] facets)
{
  using (var client = SitecoreXConnectClientConfiguration.GetClient())
  {
    var contactReference = new ContactReference(contactId);
    var contact = facets == null || facets.Length == 0 ? client.Get(contactReference, new ContactExpandOptions(Array.Empty<string>())) : client.Get(contactReference, new ContactExpandOptions(facets));
    if (contact == null)
    {
      throw new ContactNotFoundException(FormattableString.Invariant($"No Contact with id [{contactId}] found"));
    }
   
  return contact;
  }
}

When comparing this code to what we had in Sitecore 8, we have a bit more code but it all seems to make sense. Especially when  you get familiar with coding with xConnect.
What happens here in short:

1. Create a dataTable
2. Fetch the contact from xConnect with the necessary facet(s)
3. Read the data from the contact and add it to the dataTable
4. Set the dataTable in the pipeline arguments

Special thanks to Nico Geeroms who did the actual coding and testing on this one.

Sitecore Forms Send Email Campaign message

Sitecore Forms 9.0 Update-1 rev. 171219

Sitecore release it's Update-1 version of the platform. In this version they included EXM (Email Experience Manager) as out-of-the-box part of the product. No more separate module..  like they did with Forms before. This change also had some (expected) changes to the Forms module. In the initial release version there was no submit action that could send an email. We expected this to be introduced together with EXM and that was a correct assumption.

So.. we have a "Send Email Campaign message" submit action now.

Send Email Campaign message submit action

I tried to do a quick test on a vanilla install of the platform:

1. Create an automated campaign in EXM (how-to)
2. Test the campaign - yes, the test mail arrived perfectly.
3. Create a form (any form will do), added a few fields and all wanted save actions, amongst which the "Send Email Campaign Message" - place it before the redirect ;)
   The save action will allow you to select a campaign - my newly created campaign was in the list so I selected that one.
4. Add the form to a page (we had to create/generate an mvc layout for this*)
5. Publish everything and let's try this...

Submit the form with some test data.. and.. damn..  "Failed to send email!" 

In the Sitecore logs I found more information:  ERROR Contact id is null.

As I am not that familiar with EXM (yet), as probably quite a lot of others, I was not aware that I could only send a mail to a known contact. Sitecore Support helped me on this one, so now I figured out that I do need to identify my contact first.

To send an email with the "Send Email Campaign Message" action, your contact needs to be identified.

Sound reasonable, but the (first) problem is that there is no out-of-the-box submit action to do this. Luckily all you need to do this yourself has been documented on the official doc site.  (still weird that they can document it, but not put it in the product...).

Documentation on the submit action could have saved me some time, so hopefully this small post will help someone.

Further usage

We did not find a way to send the form data in the message (without customizing the save action) - unless the form data is all in the contact data, which probably is not the case.

We also haven't found a solution to send the email to someone else - not the person who submitted the form. The mail will be send to the identified contact.

Conclusion

I must admit I was hoping Update-1 would have more impact on the Forms part of the product. I was also hoping the "Send Email" functionality would be in there. One could say it is, but without custom code is useless. Let's get our hopes up for Update-2...

Questions?

For questions on the topic, please find me (and many other Sitecore folks) on Sitecore Slack or Stack Exchange.

Is your custom automated campaign is not showing in the Send Email Campaign Message Action? See https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/a/11511/237

* Sitecore Forms is MVC only - and the vanilla setup of Sitecore still comes with a default WebForms homepage 😞

Sitecore Experience Accelerator SXA 1.6: Snippets

Sitecore Experience Accelerator 1.6

Together with Sitecore 9.0 update-1 we welcomed SXA 1.6.

Together with #Sitecore 9 update-1, we warmly welcome #SXA 1.6 https://t.co/OTCNIqcSx0 Snippets, caching, splitter enhancements and so much more! pic.twitter.com/7ZQTt46Pa0

— Gert Gullentops (@Gatagordo) January 8, 2018

One of the things I was really looking forward to are Snippets:

The Snippet rendering lets you create a reusable group of renderings. It is a composite rendering that consists of several renderings that can be designed separately in the Experience Editor.

Our analists asked for this a while ago as it makes life for editors potentially a lot easier. Partial designs are nice, but their content is fixed - you cannot alter anything on the page itself, not even switch datasources. With snippets you can now create your own "composite rendering" (in the end, that is indeed what it is) and reuse this on lots of pages. Unlike partials designs, you do need to place the snippet on the page yourself - it doesn't come automatically with the page design.

Create a grid based on (multiple) splitters and add other renderings in it. Save this bunch, reuse it, and be able to still adapt the content if needed. Oh yes, this will be used!

I installed SXA 1.6 on a vanilla Sitecore 9.0-1 (installing is still a piece of cake btw) and tried them out.

Creating a snippet

To add a snippet on your page, select Snippet from the Composites section in the toolbox (experience editor). Just as you would add any other rendering. Select the location -placeholder- where you want the snippet to appear and drag & drop.

You will get the screen to select the "Associated Content" or datasource. This is an item of type Snippet. You get 2 possible locations presented: a global folder for your site called Snippets and the local Data folder (which is located as a child underneath your current item). People working with Sitecore will recognize such a screen. 

If you want to reuse your snippet on other pages, make sure to put it in the global Snippets folder as your local Data one will not be available on other pages in your site. 

The screenshot shows an example after we had created a demo item in each folder.

Filling the snippet

You can add anything you want to the snippet. Just drag & drop all the desired renderings on it, enter content, add more datasources and so on. Just as if the snippet wasn't there. 

For my test, I just added a column splitter with a RichText component in the first column and a reusable RichText component in the second.

If you check the created items in the content editor you will notice that all was done as expected - the local datasources are underneath the snippet item in a Data folder and the reusable RT component datasource item was also on it's normal place in the global texts folder.

Reusing the snippet

Datasource Configuration

Before you start reusing the snippet, take a look at this section in the snippet item:

This is the datasource configuration which by default (standard values) will be set on "Do not copy".

You need to think about this one. I didn't find a way to set this in the experience editor by the way - if someone knows how to do that please share.. and if not possible the SXA team may put this on their backlog ;)

What are the options here:

• Do not copy - use global datasource : if this is set when the snippet is reused, the datasources are not created locally but instead the snippet will refer to the original datasources. Meaning that if you change anything, it will also change on all other locations where the snippet is used. The snippets remain coupled.
• Copy global data source to local context upon slection: if this is set when the snippet is reused, the snippet item and all the related datasources (it's children) are copied to the current item's local Data folder. Meaning that you can change all data within the snippet without affecting anything else. The snippets are not coupled anymore.
• Ask user whether the copy of global data source to local context is required upon selection: seems obvious.. ask the user which of the above he wants.

I tried all three of them and will focus further on the last one. 

If this is set, and the user added his snippet a screen is presented to him/her as seen in the screenshot on the right. For me this was crystal clear, but I did get the comment that for a (simple) end user that might not be the case. Haven't been able to test that yet, so future will tell. Anyway, I added the snippet I created twice on a new page - once with "yes" and once with "no".

If I looked in the content editor all looked fine (at first sight). The items were created locally one - for the snippet where I selected "yes" as expected. Also, as expected, the reusable RichText component datasources were not copied - the remained in the global data folder.  In the experience editor all looked fine as well. 

Small issue

Too bad I did find a little issue though.. apparently in case of "yes" the datasource items were created fine, but were not set in the snippet rendering - so the snippet was still using the global ones. It does work when you use the "copy to local" settings, so the issue is only when letting the user choose. I created a ticket with Sitecore Support and will edit here when I get a fix. 

Conclusion

As I was really looking forward to it, it's a shame I found an issue - but as I'm sure the sxa team will fix this (and I will keep you posted). The feature has everthing I think I wanted so actually: Hooray for Boo.. no, snippets :)

Upgrading to Sitecore 9 update-1 (rev. 171219)

Notes from upgrading from a 9.0 initial release

I just upgraded a stadalone (vanilla) install of Sitecore 9.0 initial release (rev. 171002) -installed with SIF- to update-1 (rev. 171219). All went fine, no real issues but a few small tips might help...

Note that we had installed our initial version with SIF

If you have used SIF-less (a UI Wrapper for Sitecore Installation Framework) remember that your result will be the same as it uses SIF underneath.

Sitecore configuration files

When installing Sitecore with SIF, some of your parameters are set inside the Sitecore configuration files. This will give conflicts when upgrading to update-1. Luckily the Sitecore upgrade wizard is now smart enough to tell us this. I had conflicts in:

•  App_Config\Sitecore.config: The 'dataFolder' variable has been manually modified (weird?)
• App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.DefaultIndexConfiguration.config:  the url to our Solr instance was in here
• App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Master.config
  App_Config\Sitecore\ContentSearch\Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Index.Core.config
  App_Config\Sitecore\ContentTesting\Sitecore.ContentTesting.Solr.IndexConfiguration.config: <param desc="core">...</param> is in there and changed to $(id) instead of the name of the core - so if that doesn't match the name of the index it won't work anymore. Note that this is only changed for some indexes like master and core, not for others like web.
• Web.config: the search provider was reset to Lucene - had to switch back to Solr

An mentioned Sitecore will warn you about these changes so no worries - just make sure that you do review the configs after the upgrade or you will get errors.

EXM install

EXM is "new" in this release (not really new, but it wasn't available in the initial release) and comes packed within the Sitecore box now. During the upgrade process you will need to deploy the EXM databases. It won't tell you how to set your SQL user though (or it assumes that we use the dbo - do not!). I tried to figure it out (see StackExchange).

My conclusion for the user in the connection string -at the moment- is: 

• read/write rights on both databases
• execute rights on the exm.master database