Export Sitecore Item Data using Sitecore PowerShell

nikkipunjabi 8 Comments

I heard a lot about Sitecore PowerShell – it’s the great tool and one of the best module on Sitecore Marketplace. Also the most downloaded module crossing SIM. One fine day I was installing SXA, that also said — Before you install the SXA package, please make sure that you have installed: Sitecore PowerShell extensions (full 4.5 for Sitecore 8) from https://marketplace.sitecore.net/Modules/S/Sitecore_PowerShell_console.aspx. Then I started exploring PowerShell from the Video Series by Michael West on YouTube. These are awesome videos to learn and understand Sitecore PowerShell. And once you have viewed the videos, after that when you look at the script, you will easily understand it. For every Sitecore Developer, it’s worth exploring Sitecore PowerShell. You’ll really like and enjoy with it. You won’t open Visual Studio to code, you will only open Sitecore for scripting – as it says – Sitecore PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment).

 

Export Sitecore Items Data — We are using this tool a lot to give the reports or data to the client, created in a .aspx file – It was written by my friend. And then I modified it based on requirements. After exploring PowerShell. I thought to implement it in PowerShell. And it got ready in couple of hours as I knew how to work with Sitecore PowerShell 😉

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An error occurred in Sitecore Experience Editor

nikkipunjabi 2 Comments

While working on Sitecore Site — I faced an error for few pages in the experience editor. As always quickly I tried to search on google to find the solution, but I didn’t found any solution related to an error. And the reason is — The error that I was getting was totally different on the browser while the actual problem was something else.

Error:  An error occurred. [Log message: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: version]

sitecore_experience_editor

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Sitecore Items – Get Keyword Reference Items

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Challenge:

We need to know in how many Sitecore items word “keyword” is present. This requirement arrived because client had a contract with one third party service and now they have planned to discard the contract with that party and change the service with other party. Now these third party services provide some script which we add in Sitecore item and now for all the items where we have script used by first service need to be replaced with another. And the site is very big and we can’t check each and every item where the “keyword” is present.

So after discussing with Urvesh, we came up with an idea to fetch from Database directly.

001

Solution:

Ultimately sitecore stores the value in Database into three tables — Versioned, Unversioned and Shared fields. So we wrote a query which will hit all the three tables and provide us the item ids where the keyword is present. The site is in many languages and if in any language version the keyword is present then it will be captured. This saved enormous time and money. 🙂 We’ve heavily used this utility for providing the report to the Content Authors and Migration. Additionally we have created many such tools which can update the items in bulk, we will share it soon.

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Sitecore Module – Delete Multiple Items

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Delete Multiple Items – A module for Content Authors to Delete Multiple Items.

Sitecore 7.0 Sheer UI – ASPX Application
Sitecore 8.2 Speak UI

A Module for deleting Multiple Sitecore Items. This application was built first as an ASPX page (You can access it with /sitecore/admin/DeleteMultipleItems/DeleteMultipleItems.aspx), then provided an option in Sitecore Start Menu which can be used as an application as shown in screenshot. After that I learnt and explored Speak application via Knockout JS and then built a new application based on SPEAK UI which can run on Sitecore 8.2. Download the package based on the Sitecore version in which you are going to install.

Download it from Sitecore Marketplace

Documentation: GitHub

Source Code: GitHub

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Sitecore Module – Sitecore Child Item Count

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Sitecore Child Item Count Module is for getting the child item of the selected item in Content Editor. It also provide an option to specify the template id of child item, if you want to fetch the items of any specific template. It works based on the index. It also check the current Language. If your current selected language is Japanese and if the child item doesn’t exist with Japanese language version than it won’t include in child count.

For more information: Documentation

Download it from – Sitecore Marketplace

Source Code: GitHub

How to use Linq Lambda Expression IEqualityComparer For IEnumerable.Except

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One of the thing that sometimes annoys is Lambda Expression with IEqualityComparer. I was trying to pick items with Except Comparer from the list. After doing quick search on google found the below extension method which can be used in such scenario. 

public static IEnumerable Except(this IEnumerable first, IEnumerable second, Func<TSource, TSource, bool> comparer)
{
return first.Where(x => second.Count(y => comparer(x, y)) == 0);
}

How to use:

List myItemsList = source.Except(myDeals, (x, y) => x.ID == y.ID).Take(requiredCount).ToList();

This will return the list of items except item(s) which match with an ID in myDeals. 

Sitecore query with hypen or dashes

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Challenge:

Sometimes your sitecore query might contains hypen or space and you get an error: “unterminated literal string in Query”. It is because the query contains an illegal character and the solution is to escape the “-“.So we need to add hash(#) around the word in the query.

Query: /sitecore/content/My Site/Event/ABC-Items

Earlier I referred the below article and implimented in one of the project:

Escaping dashes/“-” in Sitecore Queries. Datasource query Update

This is actually the nice example. But while working on another project, I applied below piece of code which I think is better and easy solution then the one given in above link.

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Sitecore Experience Editor with different Site context

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Challenge:

In Multi-Site Sitecore solution we allow user to load any site in Experience Editor with any Sitecore Site URL. We also provide an option to the user to create Sites on the fly. The problem we were facing was during Experience Editor. In Experience Editor you can make use of query string and get the Item based on sc_itemid. That was working absolutely fine. Now we provided an option to a user in Ribbon to change the color. Every Custom Site that user creates on the fly – each have their own fields to change the color.  We were not getting the correct site because Webutil was providing the below information.

Sitecore.Web.WebUtil.GetRawUrl(): “/-/speak/request/v1/expeditor/ExperienceEditor.GenerateFieldUrl”

Speak Request URL: http://sc8.com:80/-/speak/request/v1/expeditor/ExperienceEditor.GenerateFieldUrl

Now in this request you don’t get sc_itemid – we wanted to get the actual item id (sc_itemid) based on the current Site which user has loaded in Experience Editor, so that we can show/load the correct option to change the color.

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Error: Could not load file or assembly Ninject

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Challenge:

Error: Could not load file or assembly ‘Ninject, Version=3.2.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c7192dc5380945e7’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Above error started appearing suddenly in our local Sitecore (Sitecore.NET 8.1 (rev. 151207)) project. We eyed lot of articles on-line but none helped, So that is why I thought it’s better to blog this out. We investigated for couple of hours to get this fixed, may be this post saves someone’s time.

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