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Showing posts from September, 2017

Null Explosion Prevention with Datasources!

Sometimes bad data can sneak into the smallest of things and wreak havoc on a site bringing up a dreaded error page (hopefully captured and prettified). We’re going to cover two examples of sneaky bad data blowing up a component and how we can address the problem. The scenario here revolves around an invalid datasource and a component making use of Glass - this bad data can come about from a publishing issue (such as publishing the page which references a datasource that hasn’t been published or wasn’t in the final workflow step to allow publishing), or some other kind of issue (an invalid item ID, a deleted item still being referenced etc). 1. Getting the Item In the code for our rendering, we want to grab that datasource item to help out our model, so we did the following: This confirms that the Guid is a valid format - but doesn’t confirm that it’s a valid item in the database before we pass it to GetItem to grab and cast to our Item_Type. It wouldn't be unreasonable to