Category Archives: Sitecore Bugs

Relates to bugs that I have come across that may help other Developers to resolve before turning to Sitecore Support.

Sitecore 9 Experience Editor

Glass.Mapper Experience Editor Issue with Sitecore 9

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My team and I were doing some development over the past couple of weeks with Sitecore 9 and Ignition, which uses Glass.Mapper. We updated Ignition in the project to use Glass.Mapper Version 4.4.0.199. All was working fine for rendering out the fields to the page, but when it came to rendering out the text fields to the Experience Editor and having them be Experience Editor friendly, “Houston, we had a problem”!

We were using the HTML helper below:

@Html.Glass().Editable(Model, x => x.Title)

When we got to the Experience Editor, the page looked liked this due to all the text fields we had using the HTML helper:

Experience Editor Issue

Experience Editor Issue

My assumption, was that Sitecore 9 was not playing well with the older Glass.Mapper versions, but I could not be for certain. Luckily, thanks to this awesome Sitecore community, I got on the “Glass” channel of Slack and asked what might be the issue, and Mike Edwards got back to me right away stating, that I should use the “4.4.1.328-beta (Pre-Release Version)” as that is the first one to have all the changes for Sitecore 9. I was right on track to fix the issue, but after looking in NuGet I could not find it! Turns out I needed to check the “Include prerelease” checkbox pointed out below (image thanks to Mike Edwards). Good lookin’ out Mike!

NuGet Pre-Release Version

NuGet Pre-Release Version

Once I updated my solution to the 4.4.1.328-beta (Pre-Release Version), the strings were then Editable in the Experience Editor making me, the development team, and the QA people happy campers now that they can test functionality of our components. Happy coding!

No Analytics Tracking in Sitecore 8.1

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Recently, I was diagnosing an issue as to why Sitecore Analytics was not working for one of our 8.1 recent installations. I started with this helpful blog post by one of the guys at nonlinear digital:

http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/Digital/how-we-think/articles/2015/10/Troubleshooting-Sitecore-8-XP-Analytics.aspx

Well, after thoroughly going through all the steps my analytics were still not working and no data was being received by MongoDB in my Interactions collection and my Reporting database (analytics) was not receiving any data. After speaking with Sitecore Support, they mentioned that in the Global.asax file you must derive from the Sitecore.Web.Application to support the session end handler. When I checked my Global.asax it was set to derive from System.Web.HttpApplication. Once I set to derive from Sitecore.Web.Application this cleared up a couple of errors within the solution relating to the VisitorIdentification SitecoreHelper for MVC (@Html.Sitecore().VisitorIdentification()) and using statement (@using SItecore.Mvc.Analytics.Extensions). But most important, tracking started working as my collections in MongoDB and Reporting DB started receiving data.

Moral of the story, don’t miss this step upon setup of your solution in the beginning of your setup to work with Sitecore 8 as it will prove hard to diagnose. Hopefully, this helps out others who run across this situation. Happy coding!

Helpful Tips to Troubleshooting Sitecore Issues

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Below is a LIVING list of helpful troubleshooting tips to fixing Sitecore issues.  Meaning, these are tips that Sitecore developers typically will run through before going to the Sitecore Community and/or Sitecore Support.  If a tip is not in this list, feel free to comment and I will add it to this running list.

These are tips, in no order, that might be helpful to aid you in determining the root of an issue and coming to resolution:

  • Check the Sitecore Logs for errors located in the Data/Logs folder.  It’s a best practice to have the Data folder as sibling to the Website folder and not inside the Website folder.
  • Using Chrome’s Web Developer tool you can check the Network tab, or in Firefox Firebug use the Profile button to see if anything is failing with when being loaded or events are firing etc.
  • See if the issue is browser specific by using different browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome).
  • Debug with Visual Studio for ASP.NET/C# issues.
  • Debug with Firebug/Chrome Web Developer tool for JavaScript type of issues.
  • If .dll issue take a look at the .dll in .NET Reflector, or similar reflection tool, and see what the code is setup to do.  This might lead you in the direction of the issue.
  • Try clearing the cache at http://[yoursite]/sitecore/admin/cache.aspx
  • Check to make sure your includes are being included post .config build at http://[yoursite]/sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx
  • Try recycling the app pool for the website.
  • If missing files/items see if a previous package was installed and reinstall to pick up the files/items.
  • Is the issue environmental, meaning works in one Sitecore instance locally, but not in staging/production? If so, what could be the difference in files/items/configuration you can compare that will give you direction to solve the problem. You may need to use a tool like Beyond Compare, or similar tool, to diff some files to get to the root of the issue.

Thanks in advance for any helpful tips to help out the Sitecore community! Happy coding!

Lucene.Net Upgrade Issue with Sitecore 6.6.0 rev. 120918

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I am performing an upgrade for a client from Sitecore 6.5.0 rev. 110818 to Sitecore 6.6.0 rev. 120918.  When I tried installing the update I got this critical error when the update finished:

“Could not load file or assembly ‘Lucene.Net, Version=X.X.X.X, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’ or one of its dependencies. The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference.”

In the upgrade instructions on the SDN, it clearly states that after you install the update you may receive this message:

Note: The upgrade process might fail with the following error message: “Could not load file or assembly ‘Lucene.Net, Version=X.X.X.X, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null’ or one of its dependencies. The located assembly’s manifest definition does not match the assembly reference.”
This error happens because Sitecore CMS 6.6 uses a new strongly-named version of Lucene.NET and can occur if one of the installed modules or your custom code refers to an old version of Lucene.NET.
To fix this, disable any modules and custom code in your solution that depends on Lucene.NET, then rerun the process. If you cannot determine the exact module or code that should be disabled, or if your changes do not resolve the problem, please contact Sitecore Product Support Services.

After working with support to get some hints, it turned out that the following .dll’s and includes were causing the problems as they were referencing the old .dll’s.

Here is a list of the of the following includes and dll’s in my solution that I had to copy out of the website:

Problem Includes

Problem Includes

Problem DLL's

Problem DLL’s

Once, I copied them out into another folder and reran the update, the update successfully finished upgrading my instance.  Hopefully, this saves you some time.  Happy coding!

SEO Toolkit Endless Analyzing Bug

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I came across this bug for the second time now and decided to post the resolution so that it may help other developers save some time before turning to Sitecore Support.

Bug:

After installing the SEO Toolkit module when you click on the Search Engine Optimization button in the Desktop, a new window opens up and starts loading the home page.  However, when analyzing that page, or any other for that matter, the “Analyzing page…” continues to spin in the upper right hand corner and never returns any data in the tabs in the very bottom of the web page.

I encountered this bug in these versions:

  • Sitecore Version: 6.6.0 rev. 130111 using SEO Toolkit Version: 1.3.0 rev. 120613
  • Sitecore Version: 6.5.0 rev. 120706 using SEO Toolkit Version: 1.3.0 rev. 110530

Resolution:

  1. Save the image below to your local hard drive (“delete.png”) file and place it in the “\Website\seotoolkit” folder.
    delete.png
  2. Modify the “Website\seotoolkit\client\link.js” file:
Replace this line:
overlay.innerHTML = '<img src="' + seo.page.baseUrl + linkDeleteImageUrl + '" />';
With this one:
overlay.innerHTML = '<img src="' + seo.page.baseUrl + "/seotoolkit/delete.png" + '" />';

This should fix the issue and any page you go to should now take a little bit of time to analyze the page and render data at the bottom of the web page.  Happy coding!