Amy's Sitecore Adventures!

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...

One of the important steps of any website is setting it up to fail Nicely. Sitecore has done a lot of this for us with their error pages, but that may not be the look you want your visitors to see! And what if Sitecore isn’t able to help at all? Not so pretty with ASP.NET error pages… But do not fear! With the configuration files Sitecore makes available, this is a snap to set up and fix.*** ***You Will need to change the web.config file, so please back it up before making any changes suggested here! The first and hardest step – make your error/not found pages that you want your visitors to see – these can be html pages, aspx pages, or even an existing page within Sitecore. Quick Edit!-- As a commenter pointed out: using Sitecore pages for your 404/page not found type errors can allow you to make use of the Sitecore features for multilingual sites as well as analytics. Not to mention, it makes it very easy for business users to make the changes. Usually Sitecore will handle you...

To have the save action for your form actually send email, you will need to change one of the settings, otherwise you will receive this error whenever submitting the form: We experience a technical difficulty while processing your request. Your data may not have been correctly saved. Also in your log (/data/logs/newest log file) you will see this error after the form has been submitted: Exception: System.Net.WebException Message: The remote name could not be resolved: 'example.host' Source: System at System.Net.ServicePoint.GetConnection(PooledStream PooledStream, Object owner, Boolean async, IPAddress& address, Socket& abortSocket, Socket& abortSocket6, Int32 timeout) at System.Net.PooledStream.Activate(Object owningObject, Boolean async, Int32 timeout, GeneralAsyncDelegate asyncCallback) at System.Net.PooledStream.Activate(Object owningObject, GeneralAsyncDelegate asyncCallback) at System.Net.ConnectionPool.GetConnection(Object owningObject, GeneralA...