After writing my post about having fun with experience manager last year, I think it is time for a small update. This time I’ll keep it short, but we will have even more fun with XPM!
Even more fun with Experience Manager
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Category Archives: Helpful Tridion tips
Tridion and Solr Versioning: a SI4T Story
Here is a quick story with a lesson learnt: One of our clients was running Tridion 2011SP1 and installed Solr 4.8.1, and asked us to configure SI4T. We banged our heads against this thing until major head trauma occurred. The outcome was not successful. The lesson learnt is that Tridion 2011SP1 is compatible up to Solr 4.7 only. Starting with Solr 4.8 you’ll need to be running Tridion 2013 +. Read on for details…
Tridion publishing : httpupload settings for publishing a large page or component
We all have encountered a publish failure caused by the Tridion http deployer website throwing errors like ‘request entity too large’. Basically, it means that IIS does not accept the uploaded publish package because it’s simply too large.
Luckily, the solution is quite simple, but we recently discovered a small gotcha.
Tricking Tridion Into Unpublishing Content From Dead Targets
The duplicate binary error on Tridion one is a common and often annoying issue. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of running across it, Chris Summers discusses it at length here. Today I found a new (to me) twist on the issue.
We were trying to replace some old binaries, but kept getting this error. The reason was that even though we had unpublished the old binaries, Tridion was still showing them as published to a number of old, out of service publication targets. Unfortunately, the HTTPS upload URLs for these targets were shut down long ago, meaning Tridion could never successfully unpublish our binaries from these targets. Or could it?
Since the servers these targets point to no longer exist, it wasn’t important that Tridion actually remove the files, only that it thought it had. To trick Tridion into believing this we temporarily replaced the HTTPS upload URL with our current working URL (where the files were already unpublished) and added our current target type to each target. Now all we had to do was unpublish our binaries again and voila, Where Used shows Tridion has no references to binaries on old targets and we have no more duplicate binary error.
Of course, with new versions of Tridion the old publishing targets will no longer pose a problem thanks to the ability to decommission a publishing target, discussed by Bart Koopman here. For those still working with older versions this simple trick may be useful for when you need to unpublish from a dead publishing target.
Quick DD4T tip : combine ‘static’ images and images handled with the BinaryDistributionModule
In a DD4T website, you can serve images from the broker using the BinaryDistributionModule. This is a module that intercepts requests for any images, and then queries the broker for published images, and serves them (I will talk about this more in-depth in a future post).
However, this might give some problems if you also have static images.
DD4T and SDL SmartTarget 2014 Integration
There are a number of steps required to install SmartTarget and all the required pieces, including FredHopper and the new SmartTarget CD Webservice Extension. That’s right; Tridion’s OData Webservice now comes with a SmartTarget extension to grab your Promotions’ items… I digress. In this article I am going to assume that you’ve done your homework and read the SDL Live Content documentation regarding the necessary moving parts, wiring and plumbing, and have it all installed. (If you’re looking for an introduction to SmartTarget 2014, have a look at John Winter’s article: A look at SmartTarget 2014). So here we’ll just jump right into answering the question of how to integrate DD4T.NET with SmartTarget 2014 and I will share an MVC HTML Helper Extension class providing us with control to render SmartTarget’s Promotion Items in your DD4T-driven MVC.NET application.
Remote Debugging in Visual Studio Made Easy(ish)
“Object reference not set to an instance of an object?!!”
I love Tridion. There’s a strange elegance to the way she operates, and when I resolve an issue or learn something new there’s no sweeter feeling. But oftentimes sometimes our Tridion can be a cruel mistress – or mister, as you fancy. We configure, install, develop, and implement on her all day long, and just when it seems we understand each other she delivers a sharp slap to remind us that she’s in charge. Saucy. Continue reading
Unit-testing your DD4T code with Mock objects
Unit testing your code is a great way to make sure your code works as expected, now, and in the future, after loads of changes to your project.
Writing tests can be pretty simple, if you have functionality that only relies on logic, but what if your code relies on ‘external’ data. How would you test that?
SDL Tridion Core Service content exposed via a REST web service
Use a treeview item picker in your GUI extensions
Recently, I was asked to build a Tridion GUI extension that would let users insert a key of a Keyword in a rich text field. Users would have to click a button in the ribbon toolbar, get a list of keywords, pick one, and the GUI extension would work it’s magic.
There are some nice examples of this to be found here, so i managed to wrap up a solution pretty quick, and life was good.
After some testing, it turned out that the amount of items in the dropdown would grow to large – if you have only 10 or 20 items to pick from, that’s fine, but what if there are hundreds…
So, a new requirement was added : “can we not have a dropdown of keywords, but a tree view, so users would be able to drill-down to find the keyword they want”.Â