Madhu Anbalagan's Blog

Sitecore CDP and Personalize Certification – Tips and Tricks

Sitecore CDP and Personalize Certification - Tips and Tricks

Sitecore CDP and Personalize Certification – Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks, that helped to get certified in Sitecore CDP and Personalize.

The first step is to register for the Sitecore CDP and Personalization exam and block a date that really helps in achieving the goal.

  1. Go through the documentation once you complete email Sitecore partner enablement partnerenablement@sitecore.com to get access to the sandbox environment.
  2.  The Sitecore Partner Enablement will send an invitation to access the Sandbox. 
  3.  Now go through the instructor-led training along with lab assignments
    Tip: I have used my blog site as a sample site to do assignments. It would be ideal to have a sample commerce site for order-related assignments.
  4. Familiarize with the core concepts and utilize the QA tool to test out various scenarios for Experiences and Experiments.
  5. Make sure to take the quiz after each section, which will give an idea of your understanding of the concepts.
  6. The questions were use case and scenario-based, so understanding the concept is crucial.
  7. The exam has 30 multiple-choice questions that have to be completed in an hour. You will have a good amount of time to revisit the answers.
    Note: Beginning of the exam, It says it has 50 questions, this might be a typo. It has only 30 questions, chill out.

Good luck! Happy Sitecoring!

3

Install Sitecore 10.2 using Docker in 5 Easy steps!

 

Happy New Year! I just thought trying out Sitecore 10.2 using Docker. Installed it with minor hiccups. Let’s share my experience.

Prerequisites:

  •  Sitecore 10 license.
  • OS: Windows 10 1903 or later.
  • Docker Desktop for Windows.
  • 32 GB of RAM (It can be 16 GB for XM1 or XP0). I always recommend 32 GB for better experience.
  • CPU: Quad-core processor or higher.
  • Disk: 25 GB free space.

Preparation:

  • The following ports needs to be available for containers

The following ports need to be available for running the Docker instance. Make sure you are using stopping the services so it’s available for Docker to consume.  

Note: Always use iisreset /stop in the command line rather than stopping it in IIS. 

  • To check the port availability, run the following in PowerShell. It shouldn’t return any process. 

netstat -ano | findStr 127.0.0.1:443

netstat -ano | findStr 8079

netstat -ano | findStr 8984

netstat -ano | findStr 14330

Installation:

  1. Extract the file zip file downloaded into Sitecore_10.2(or any folder name).

             

      2. Execute this command to set the execution policy unrestricted.

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser Unrestricted

       3. Navigate to XP1 folder (Sitecore_10.2\SitecoreContainerDeployment.10.2.0.006766.683\compose\ltsc2019\xp1) in PowerShell and run compose-init.ps1 script.

.\compose-init.ps1 -LicenseXmlPath <License Path>

  • Note: I’m installing XP1, If you want XP0, navigate to XP0 folder and follow the same exact steps.   

    4. Run docker-compose pull

docker-compose pull

      5. Run docker-compose up (It takes some time, you can get a coffee!)

docker-compose up –d

Once it’s done, let’s bring in CM instance – 

https://xp1cm.localhost/sitecore

Login as admin using ‘Password12345‘ password (not b though)

It’s so cool see the new desktop view! Cool work Sitecore!

It’s time for CD instance – 

https://xp1cd.localhost/

 

Errors and Resolutions:

If you get unhealthy for any nodes, don’t worry. It’s very common, I get this most times. 

Run the following in PowerShell, It should fix it. Thank you Sitecore Staff Exchange!   

docker-compose down

iisreset /stop

docker-compose up –d

 

To check if all nodes are healthy, run docker-compose ps 

If you want to change the Sitecore and/or SQL password, you can change it in docker-compose.ps1 file. 

Hope this helps someone. Happy Sitecoring!

3

My 2021 Reflections

Hope everyone got the Covid-19 vaccines and staying safe.  

Here are my contributions for the year – 

Presentations:

Blog Posts :

Award :

  • Experience Awards 2021 (Honorable Mention)  

Certification:   

  • Sitecore 10 .NET Developer Certification  

Contributions :

  • Logged Sitecore Bugs  
    •  CS0208574 Forms are missing in Forms Designer View
    •  CS0206915 High memory utilization on xConnect/Solr server 

Conferences I attended:

  • Symposium
  • SUGCON  
  • Virtual Developer Day
  • MVP Sitecore Lunches  
  • All Pittsburgh SUG meetups 
  • Most of the SUG Boston/ Queen City/ Columbus meetups  

Co-organized SUG-Pittsburgh Meetups :

Co-organized SUG-QueenCity Meetup :

 

Plans for 2021 :

Learn and contribute:

  • Sitecore 10.2
  • Composable DXP
  • Containerization
  • Sitecore Saas Offerings

Co-organize :

  • Monthly SUG-Pittsburgh meetup
  • Monthly SUG-QueenCity meetup

Presentations:

  • Sitecore Virtual Developer Day
  • SUGCON EU/Symposium
  • SUG Meetups

Happy Sitecoring!

 

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Sitecore Forms missing | No Forms to display – Issue fix

Sitecore Forms were missing in Forms Designer view after being created. I experience the same and here are the things I tried to get fixed.

  • Cleared browser cache
  • Cleared Sitecore cache (/sitecore/admin/cache.aspx)
  • Incognito/private mode to see if Forms are showing up
  • Rebuilt Forms folder from Developer menu (faster way)
  • Rebuilt Sitecore Master Index

After doing above all, Forms weren’t still showing up 🙁  Decided to take a deeper dive.

I checked the JobsViewer(/sitecore/admin/jobs.aspx) to check what jobs are running and to my surprise, the re-indexing only Forms folder was running for more than 2 hours and they were so many jobs queued up (Content Authors may be busy creating more content for the website).

I was wondering what’s causing the indexing queue to be clogged. Checked the Crawling log using Sitecore Log Analyzer to see what’s happening and for every single update, it was triggering re-index synchronously and immediately checked the Indexing Strategy for sitecore_master_index and it was set to syncMaster! 

This was the root cause of the problem because every time the Content Author was making a change it was triggering the re-index synchronously, whereas it should asynchronously re-indexed with an interval. I switched it to the intervalAsyncMaster strategy to fix the issue.

Tip: Sitecore Log Analyzer is a powerful tool for parsing Sitecore log files. It provides the interface to explore and navigate through a large amount of log data.

 

Here is the patch I used to update the index strategy. 

Now within few minutes, all queue jobs cleared and moved to finished jobs.

Checked Forms in Designer view, all forms were showing up! Tada!

Hope this helps someone.

Happy Sitecoring!

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Sitecore Sidekick – Upgrade

I was working on a Sitecore 9.0.2 client project and the Sitecore Sidekick(1.4.4 version) was already installed. When I tried to initiate the Sidekick and it was throwing an error –

Method not found: Void Rainbow.Storage.IDataStore.Save(Rainbow.Model.IItemData) SitecoreSidekick.Shared.IoC.Container.Resolve(Object[] args) +776
ScsContentMigrator.Core.ContentItemInstaller..ctor() +313
ScsContentMigrator.&lt;&gt;c.&lt;InitializeContainer&gt;b__5_4(Object[] args) +31
SitecoreSidekick.Shared.IoC.Container.Resolve(Object[] args) +117

While researching the error, came to know that I need to update Rainbow and Unicorn (If you use Unicorn in your project to serialize items make sure you install the No Rainbow package as this will not overwrite Unicorn’s Rainbow DLL files but rather utilize whatever version Unicorn is using (Sidekick can work with any version). You can skip if your project doesn’t use it) packages as it wasn’t compatible with the versions that were installed.

I was wondering what version of these packages(SideKick, Rainbow, and Unicorn) will be compatible with Sitecore 9.0.2 and realized it doesn’t matter! 

So decided to update the Sidekick(it automatically updates Rainbow) and Unicorn with the latest version via NuGet. Make sure to update all installed Sidekick packages to up-to-date. In my case, I updated the below ones – 

  • SitecoreSidekickFoundation
  • SitecoreSidekickContentMigrator
  • SitecoreSidekickCore
  • SitecoreSidekickAuditLog
  • SitecoreSidekickEditingContext

It automatically updated all the dependencies like below

Now updating Unicorn(Skip if your project doesn’t use it for serialization)  

All packages and it’s dependencies were successfully installed and deployed to QA and UAT environments(it needs to be deployed to the servers in order to make the contract) and the Sidekick started working.

Now we were able to pull content from any environment!

Installing via Sitecore Package

It is not recommended, If you like to install it in environments directly without check-in to source control, you can install it as a package. Download the latest package at the root of the repo.

References

  • https://jeffdarchuk.com/2016/10/24/sitecore-sidekick-content-migrator/
  • https://kamsar.net/index.php/category/Unicorn/

Hope this helps someone. 

Happy Sitecoring!

 

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High memory utilization fix for xConnect server

We were seeing High memory utilization on the xConnect server and it coincides with when our monitoring service reports the site being down. Logs were particularly showing these two errors related to the xConnect –

Error #1:

System.OperationCanceledException: The operation was canceled.
at System.Threading.CancellationToken.ThrowOperationCanceledException()
at System.Web.Http.Filters.ActionFilterAttribute.<CallOnActionExecutedAsync>d__5.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Filters.ActionFilterAttribute.<ExecuteActionFilterAsyncCore>d__0.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Controllers.ActionFilterResult.<ExecuteAsync>d__2.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Filters.AuthorizationFilterAttribute.<ExecuteAuthorizationFilterAsyncCore>d__2.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Controllers.AuthenticationFilterResult.<ExecuteAsync>d__0.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Controllers.ExceptionFilterResult.<ExecuteAsync>d__0.MoveNext()

Error #2:

Sitecore.XConnect.Operations.SetFacetOperation`1[Sitecore.XConnect.Facet]: Sitecore.XConnect.Operations.FacetOperationException: Operation #0, AlreadyExists, Contact {32971b60-1245-0000-0000-0611bab4b38e}, Classification
[Error] ["XdbContextLoggingPlugin"] XdbContext Batch Execution Exception
Sitecore.XConnect.Operations.FacetOperationException: Operation #0, AlreadyExists, Contact {32971b60-1245-0000-0000-0611bab4b38e}, Classification
 [Error] XConnect Exception Filter OnException(), url - "https://prod9-xconnect.everence.com/odata/Contacts?%24filter=Identifiers%2fany(id:id%2fIdentifier+eq+'a5642a9a87ad41e1ab65a624b7d1b1f6'+and+id%2fSource+eq+'xDB.Tracker')&%24expand=Identifiers,MergeInfo,ConsentInformation,Classification,EngagementMeasures,ContactBehaviorProfile,Personal,KeyBehaviorCache,ListSubscriptions,AutomationPlanEnrollmentCache,AutomationPlanExit,TestCombinations"
System.OperationCanceledException: The operation was canceled.
at System.Threading.CancellationToken.ThrowOperationCanceledException()
at System.Web.Http.Filters.ActionFilterAttribute.<CallOnActionExecutedAsync>d__5.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Filters.ActionFilterAttribute.<ExecuteActionFilterAsyncCore>d__0.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Controllers.ActionFilterResult.<ExecuteAsync>d__2.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Filters.AuthorizationFilterAttribute.<ExecuteAuthorizationFilterAsyncCore>d__2.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Controllers.AuthenticationFilterResult.<ExecuteAsync>d__0.MoveNext()
--- End of stack trace from previous location where exception was thrown ---
at System.Runtime.ExceptionServices.ExceptionDispatchInfo.Throw()
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.ThrowForNonSuccess(Task task)
at System.Runtime.CompilerServices.TaskAwaiter.HandleNonSuccessAndDebuggerNotification(Task task)
at System.Web.Http.Controllers.ExceptionFilterResult.<ExecuteAsync>d__0.MoveNext()

Investigation:

Created a dump using the Procdump tool. Here is the command I used for creating 18GB of the dump file 

procdump -m 18000 -ma [Name or PID]     

From reviewing the memory dump, we could see two SQL queries that have consumed 8GB and 6GB of memory in your XConnect instance. 

Both queries were running the [xdb_collection].[GetInteractionsByContactIds] stored procedure. This stored procedure retrieves interaction data for a contact.

The queries are attempting to retrieve the interactions for a specific Contact ID. After reviewing some of the retrieved interactions from this contact, we could see the User-Agent for this contact was

Mozilla/5.0 (Unknown; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/534.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) PingdomTMS/0.8.5 Safari/534.34

The above agent is Pingdom (It is a website monitoring and availability service) to have many interactions stored in XConnect. Although it’s a bot, it was considered a valid user and the interactions were being tracked.

Resolution:

In order to mitigate the interactions from Pingdom, we added the User-Agent of Pingdom to the <excludedUserAgents> configuration (Sitecore.Analytics.ExcludeRobots.config) so that future visits from Pingdom are treated as a bot and not saved to XConnect.

For more details, please see this article here: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/sitecore-experience-platform/en/configure-robot-detection-functionality.html#idp23361

Thank you Sitecore Support for helping us figure out the issue.

Happy Sitecoring!

0

Bulk update fields using SPE

I came across a scenario, where I need to update the email field for all custom forms built with ‘EmailTemplate’. Since it’s going to be a bulk update, decided to do it in SPE(so powerful!)

Here is the script I wrote –

$path = "master:/sitecore/content/external_forms"
$templateName = "EmailTemplate"
$emailAddresses = "test@test.com"
$fieldName = "ToEmail"
$items = Get-ChildItem -Path $path -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.TemplateName -eq $templateName }
foreach($item in $items) {
if($item.Fields[$fieldName] -ne 'null'){
$item.Editing.BeginEdit()
$item.Fields[$fieldName].Value = $emailAddresses
$item.Editing.EndEdit()
Write-Host ($item.Name + ": " + $item.Fields[$fieldName].Value)
}
}

Hope this helps someone. Any questions, please leave a comment.

Happy Sitecoring!

0

My 2020 Reflections

2020 has been a rough ride, Covid-19 has changed our lives. Hope we all get vaccinated in the upcoming year. Stay home, stay safe.

Here are my contributions for the year –

Presentations:

  • Feb 11 – Sitecore 9.3 new features and live installation – SUG Pittsburgh
  • March 26 – Smart Experience Forms – SUG Pittsburgh
  • April 12 – Sitecore 9.3 new features and live installation – SUG Jordon
  • July 15 – What’s new in Sitecore 9.3 and Live Installation – SUG QueenCity

Blog Posts:

Podcast:

YouTube:

Conferences I attended:

  • Sitecore Symposium
  • All SUG Boston/ Pittsburgh/Queen City meetups.

Co-organized SUG-Pittsburgh Meetups :

Co-organized SUG-QueenCity Meetups :

Participation:

  • Sitecore Lunch
  • Hackathon

Plans for 2021 :

Learn and contribute:

  • Content Hub
  • Cortex
  • Sitecore AI Personalization
  • Sitecore Experience Forms
  • Docker Containers
  • Sitecore 10

Co-organize :

  • Monthly SUG-Pittsburgh meetup
  • Monthly SUG-QueenCity meetup

Presentations:

  • SUG Meetups
  • Sitecore SUGCON EU/Symposium

Happy Sitecoring!

0

Sitecore 10 SIF Installation Roadblocks

Sitecore_10_Installation_Roadblocks

Sitecore 10 was out a couple of months back. I installed it using SIF, hit a couple of roadblocks while installing and sharing the resolutions that helped resolve the issues.

If you haven’t installed Sitecore 10, here are some blogs that help you install.

Sitecore 10 using SIF: https://scorewow.wordpress.com/2020/08/05/install-sitecore-10-in-10-using-sif/

Sitecore 10 using SIA: https://madhuanbalagan.com/installing-sitecore-10-using-sia

 

Error # 1: Solr Port Issue

I have multiple Solr services running for different versions of Sitecore and here is the error I got while installing Sitecore 10.

“Port 8984 is already being used by another process. Please choose a different port”.

Run services.msc to check how many Solr’s are running on the machine.

Resolution:

If you have multiple instances of Solr running and you don’t know what port, it’s associated with. Here is a quick way to get the process name and kill if it’s is no longer needed.

Find which process using Solr port

 

Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort $portNumber).OwningProcess

Sitecore_10_Installation_Find-_Which_Process_Using_Solr_Port

Also when installing the Solr, you can add the Port Name and Sitecore Version number or any information in the Description of Details tab.

This is life saver, do not need to worry about which Solr maps which port in the future!

 

Sitecore_10_Installation_NSSM_Service

 

Sitecore_10_Installation_Service_List

 

Error # 2: SQL User Issue

“msdeploy.exe : Error: .Net SqlClient Data Provider: Msg 12809, Level 16, State 1, Line 5 You must remove all users with password before setting the containment property to NONE.                                                            At C:\ProgramFiles\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\SitecoreInstallFramework\2.2.0\Public\Tasks\Invoke-CommandTask.ps1:31 char:13”  

                                                    

Resolution:

For some reason, the SC10 uninstall did not remove all the variables for failed instances. I removed the  ‘sc10_CollectionUser’ in local DB users, fixed the issue.

 

Sitecore_10_Installation_SQL_User_Issue_Resolution

 

 

Error # 3: Credential Issue

Sitecore_10_Installation_Error_Credential_Issue

“Install-SitecoreConfiguration: A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name ‘Credential’. This error might have been caused by applying the default parameter binding. You can disable the default parameter binding in

$PSDefaultParameterValues by setting $PSDefaultParameterValues[“Disabled”] to be $true, and then trying again. The following default parameters were successfully bound for this cmdlet when the error occurred: -Debug -WarningAction

-Verbose -InformationAction -ErrorAction

At C:\ResourceFiles\XP0-SingleDeveloper.ps1:77 char:1

+ Install-SitecoreConfiguration @singleDeveloperParams *>&1 | Tee-Objec …

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Write-Error], WriteErrorException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.WriteErrorException,Install-SitecoreConfiguration”

 

Resolution:

The SqlServer module wasn’t installed by default, so I had to do it manually.

Ran this on Powershell command fixed the issue.

Install-Module -Name SqlServer -AllowClobber

 

Hope this helps someone. Any issues, let me know in the comments section.

Happy Sitecoring!

1

Sitecore Horizon 10 Installation

I want to share my experience with the Installation of Sitecore Horizon 10. 

Prerequisites

Before you install Sitecore Horizon, you must:

After you install the tools, restart your machine.

SameSite cookies and custom domains:

The commonly-used browsers such as Chrome and Safari are changing how the browsers interpret the SameSite cookie. After the change takes effect, Horizon will only work if the Sitecore Horizon host instance, the Sitecore identity instance, and the Sitecore CM instance belong to the same site. 

Sitecore CM: https://cm.mycompany.com
Sitecore identity: https://si.mycompany.com
Horizon: https://horizon.mycompany.com

Installation

  • Download Horizon 10 from here. I downloaded the on-premises deployment.  

  • Extract the zip file and open InstallHorizon.ps1

  • Fill out the below parameters –

  • Run the InstallHorizon.ps1 in Adminstrator mode.



  • Once the installation is done (only takes 2 to 3 minutes), you will see a new Icon in Sitecore XP.



  • Clicking the Icon opens Horizon (yes, it’s separate IIS site) in a new tab and you can explore the new features!

Post Installation

To use the alignment and indentation features in the rich text editor in Horizon, make sure to add the below styles to your default style sheet (like default.css in your project).

.rte-indent-1 {
     padding-left: 40px;
}
 .rte-indent-2 {
     padding-left: 80px;
}
 .rte-indent-3 {
     padding-left: 120px;
}
 .rte-indent-4 {
     padding-left: 160px;
}
 .rte-indent-5 {
     padding-left: 200px;
}
 .rte-indent-6 {
     padding-left: 240px;
}
 .rte-indent-7 {
     padding-left: 280px;
}
 .rte-indent-8 {
     padding-left: 320px;
}
 .rte-align-center {
     text-align: center;
}
 .rte-align-justify {
     text-align: justify;
}
 .rte-align-right {
     text-align: right;
}

Hope this helps someone. Any issues, let me know in the comments section.

Happy Sitecoring!

0