Ever since Sitecore 7 introduced the ContentSearch namespace, more than half of the projects I’ve worked on have required me to update Lucene indexes from code. This topic has proven to be even more complicated than publishing Sitecore items programmatically! This post will examine some of the ways you can update the Sitecore indexes as-needed, from your code, and my opinions on when you should each each method.
When researching how to publish Sitecore items in code, anyone that has done a quick search around the web can tell you that there are many different approaches. Even a quick scan of Sitecore objects will reveal a lot of publishing related classes and methods. This produces a common problem: too many options, but not enough information about which way is “best” or most appropriate for your situation. That’s why I decided to write this blog post. Hopefully this will help you get a better grasp of the different ways to trigger an item publish programmatically, and how to choose the best method for your application.
Read More »Compare and Contrast Ways to Programmatically Publish Sitecore Items
The new “with Search” fields in Sitecore 7 offer a great way for users to select items from a large list of options. One problem is that these new fields have a lot of hidden potential that is not (yet) documented very well.
It seems that all of the advanced control that a developer has over these fields is hidden in the “Source” property. Rather than spew a lot of words at you, I’ll dive right in to the values and some examples.
Read More »Filtering in a Sitecore 7 Multilist with Search or Treelist with Search
We all seem to love WebApi. On the Microsoft technology stack, it is probably the most well-conceived method of building a REST-like web service. If you are building a Sitecore website, though, you may have a problem. Sitecore takes over most of the ASP.NET request cycle, which poses a problem for other ASP.NET technologies, including WebApi. That is not the end of the story, though!
If you would rather just skip all of the boring explanation stuff, then go install this Nuget package in your web project and get off my back!
Read More »Sitecore and WebApi Living in Harmony