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  • Book Overview & Buying Sitecore Cookbook for Developers
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Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

By : Yogesh Patel, Patel Y Sunderbhai
3.7 (7)
Buy this Book
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Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

Sitecore Cookbook for Developers

3.7 (7)
By: Yogesh Patel, Patel Y Sunderbhai
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

This book will get you started on building rich websites, and customizing user interfaces by creating content management applications quickly. It will give you an insight into web designs and how to customize the Sitecore architecture as per your website's requirements using best practices. Packed with over 70 recipes to help you achieve and solve real-world common tasks, requirements, and the problems of content management, content delivery, and publishing instance environments. It also presents recipes on Sitecore’s backend processes of customizing pipelines, creating custom event handler and media handler, setting hooks and more. Other topics covered include creating a workflow action, publishing sublayouts and media files, securing your environment by customizing user profiles and access rights, boosting search capabilities, optimising performance, scalability and high-availability of Sitecore instances and much more. By the end of this book, you will have be able to add virtually limitless features to your websites by developing and deploying Sitecore efficiently.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Sections
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
Lock Free Chapter
1
1. Basic Presentation Components
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1. Basic Presentation Components
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Introduction
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Creating a simple content page using template and layout
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Creating a sidebar menu using view rendering and RenderingModel
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Creating breadcrumb using the view and custom model
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Creating carousel using view and controller renderings
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Placing renderings dynamically using placeholders
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Empowering the Experience Editor using placeholder settings
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Restricting or swapping rendering controls on placeholders
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2. Extending Presentation Components
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2. Extending Presentation Components
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Introduction
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Altering rendering behavior using component properties
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Creating strongly typed rendering parameters
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Achieving asynchronous operations using a custom device
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Creating multilingual content pages
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Generating RSS feeds for syndicated items
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Improving site performance by caching renderings
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Personalizing components
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3. Customizing the User Interface Framework
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3. Customizing the User Interface Framework
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Introduction
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Adding a custom command to item context menu
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Creating a gutter to show unpublished items
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Creating a Sheer UI application using XAML control to list products
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Creating a SPEAK application to list and sort products
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Searching and filtering products using SPEAK
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Building a custom form to bind product details using SPEAK
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Creating a custom editor tab in the Content Editor
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Creating a custom experience button using the Field Editor
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Creating a custom rule to validate item fields
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Creating a custom sorting routine to sort the content tree items
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Creating a custom field to save the date time with time zones
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4. Leveraging the Sitecore Backend
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4. Leveraging the Sitecore Backend
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Introduction
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Working with multiple sites
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Customizing pipelines to achieve a custom 404 page
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Creating a custom event handler to auto-publish on an item save
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Achieving a site-specific URL pattern for a multisite environment
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Initializing hooks to subscribe events to prepare an audit trail
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Creating jobs to accomplish long-running operations
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Using a scheduling agent to delete older item versions
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Scheduling database tasks
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5. Making Content Management More Efficient
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5. Making Content Management More Efficient
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Introduction
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Using dictionary domains for multilingual sites on a multisite environment
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Creating vanity URLs for marketing purposes using an alias item
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Centralizing common content using a clone item
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Using a wildcard item to integrate external content
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Placing dynamic content in the Rich Text Editor by replacing tokens
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Adding a custom tool to the Rich Text Editor to generate tokens
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Dealing with user-generated content using an Item Web API
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Storing external content using a custom cache
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6. Working with Media
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6. Working with Media
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Introduction
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Restricting malicious files being uploaded to the media library
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Downloading the media library folder
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Protecting media files under a disclaimer
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Achieving responsive images
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Serving media files from CDN or external storage
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7. Workflow and Publishing
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7. Workflow and Publishing
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Introduction
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Creating a custom action using workflow
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Achieving time-based automated publishing
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Unpublishing of items
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Using publishing events to send a publish completion e-mail
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Publishing file-based items using web deploy
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Clearing an HTML cache based on published items for a multisite environment
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Customizing the publishItem pipeline to avoid duplicate names on a live site
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8. Security
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8. Security
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Introduction
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Working with a custom user profile
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Creating custom access rights for an item
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Achieving a single sign-on by creating a virtual user with custom roles and rights
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Preventing Sitecore from applying security
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Implementing extranet login
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9. Sitecore Search
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9. Sitecore Search
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Introduction
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Indexing, searching, sorting, and paging content using a search query
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Creating a computed index field for categorization
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Refining search results by tagging based facets
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Achieving the autocomplete feature with a wildcard
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Influencing search results with boosting
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Hunting MoreLikeThis results
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Correcting a search with did you mean
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Managing millions of items using an item bucket
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10. Experience Personalization and Analytics Using xDB
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10. Experience Personalization and Analytics Using xDB
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Introduction
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Personalizing experience based on goals and Engagement Values
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Personalizing content by predicting a visitor's profile
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Storing visitor information in xDB contacts
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Extending xDB by creating a custom contact facet
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Creating a custom rule and condition for personalization
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Automating the engagement plan
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Finding nearby places using the Geolocation service
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Aggregating xDB data to generate custom reports
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Extending analytics reports using custom dimensions
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Creating section-specific analytics reports using custom dimensions
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11. Securing, Scaling, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting
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11. Securing, Scaling, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting
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Introduction
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Profiling and tracing content pages to find out the slowest operations
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Transferring items from one database to another
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Making security-hardened environments
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Adding multiple publishing targets for scalability or preproduction
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Creating clustered instances for scalability and performance
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Getting high availability of Sitecore instances
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Improving the performance of Sitecore instances
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A. Getting Started with Sitecore
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A. Getting Started with Sitecore
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Installing Sitecore
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Creating a Visual Studio project
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Debugging a Sitecore application
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B. Tools and Resources for Sitecore Developers
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B. Tools and Resources for Sitecore Developers
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Useful tools for Sitecore developers
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Useful resources for Sitecore developers
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Index
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Index

Placing renderings dynamically using placeholders

In the previous recipes, you learned placing components on a layout or view statically. You can empower the dynamic placement of components using a placeholder, which comes with lots of benefits that you will learn in this recipe.

How to do it…

We will first replace statically placed renderings with placeholders in Main Layout:

  1. We will first decide places where we can put content dynamically or we need placeholders, for example, breadcrumb, side menu, and main content area.
  2. From Main Layout, remove the existing renderings from these places and add placeholders, breadcrumb, left-column, and main-content as follows:
    <div class="container">
  <div id="breadcrumb">
    @Html.Sitecore().Placeholder("breadcrumb")
  </div>
  <div id="sidemenu">
    @Html.Sitecore().Placeholder("left-column")
  </div>
  <div id="contentarea">
    <article>
      @Html.Sitecore().Placeholder("main-content")
    </article>
  </div>
</div>
  3. We already have breadcrumb and Side Menu view renderings; we will create a simple view rendering to show the Title, Body, and other fields in the main content area. In the SitecoreCookbook project, create a TitleAndBody.cshtml view file in the /Views/Content/ folder with the following content, and register this rendering:
    <h1>@Html.Sitecore().Field("Title")</h1>
<div> @Html.Sitecore().Field("Body") </div>
  4. Now, we will place Breadcrumb, Side Menu, and Title and Body renderings in breadcrumb, left-column, and main-content placeholders accordingly. From the Content Editor, select Standard Values of the Site Root template. From the ribbon, click on the Details button in the Layout group from the Presentation tab to open the Layout Details dialog. Click on the Edit button to open the Device Details dialog and select the Controls section. It will show an empty list, but once you add renderings on placeholders, they will be displayed, as shown in the following image:
    How to do it…
  5. To add renderings, click on the Add button from the Device Editor dialog. It will open the Select a Rendering dialog, where you can add renderings to particular placeholders, as shown in the following image:
    How to do it…
  6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for all template standard values, where you want to add renderings. Now, preview different pages to see the power of placeholders; you will find the renderings are displayed on the pages!

Note

We could also have used the benefit of inheriting presentation details from base templates. In Sitecore 8 onward, if you don't find your renderings inherited, you can get a bug fix for it from https://goo.gl/OSMNkR.

How it works…

A placeholder is a Sitecore component used within a layout, view, or sublayout, which allows the dynamic placement of components in it. It does not have any user interface, the same as the ASP.NET placeholder control. In Sitecore MVC, a placeholder can be created using the @Html.Sitecore().Placeholder("<placeholder name>") helper class. In Web Forms, you can use <sc:Placeholder runat="server" />.

It allows users to have design flexibility and minimize the number of layouts and renderings. For example, in this recipe, we can convert our layout from a two-column (side menu and content area) to a three-column layout, simply by adding a two-column view in the main-content placeholder. Thus, you can create any type of dynamic design just using a single layout.

When you have multiple components in a single placeholder, their order is managed by layout engine, considering the order they are added to the layout details. Their order can be changed using the Move Up and Move Down buttons in the Device Editor dialog, shown in step 4. You can remove or replace any control by clicking on the Remove or Change button.

Note

If you apply layout details to an individual item, it will override layout details defined in standard values of the data template associated with the item. To revert them to standard values, use the Reset button in the Presentation tab and Layout group from the Content Editor ribbon.

See also

You can also implement dynamic placeholders (https://goo.gl/6NIF3z).

Tip

It's also possible to use nested placeholders. When you use a view inside a view, you can set the placeholder key as /<outer placeholder key>/<inner placeholder key> to place renderings to the inner placeholder.

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Sitecore Cookbook for Developers
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