Himmat Singh Dulawat (3x Sitecore MVP)

Problem Statement: When a user logs into the Sitecore CMS, the system will first check the age of the user's password. If the password is less than 60 days old, the user will be redirected to the Sitecore CMS dashboard. However, if the password is 60 days or older, the user will be redirected to the "Change Password" page. This page includes fields for: The current password A new password Confirmation of the new password Then user must enter their current password, input a new password, and confirm it. The system will validate the entries: If the validation is successful, the user's password will update. Then user will be redirected to the login page and sign in with the new password. Solution: To have a solution to this you need to write a pipeline and processor within your project that handles the logic of password expiration. Step 1: Create a Custom Pipeline and Processor: Write a custom pipeline and pr...

Problem Statement: After setting the default values in the content entity, it gives me an error when I attempt to create a new content type. However, it also creates a content entity after an error, and it works if I create a content entity, but while creating a content entity, it returns me an Elasticsearch request failed error. Error: Solution: Sitecore has investigated and identified this issue. It involves an issue with the Elasticsearch request and requires a graph rebuild to resolve. See the documentation for more information: Schema changes, inheritance, and the graph server FAQ: 1. Duration of Graph Rebuild and Downtime: How long does the graph rebuild process typically take, and how much downtime will be required for the PROD CH environment? The graph rebuild activity is estimated to take up to 2 hours to complete. During the process, Sitecore will back up the main index in the Elasticsearch deployment, as well as the ...

Problem Statement: Display the validation error message when the save button is clicked. While creating or updating entities in Sitecore Content Hub, we may have requirements to validate the author inputs based on a pre-defined condition, such as image extensions not being allowed except PNG and JPEG, checkboxes must be checked, or field values not being empty. In this blog, I am taking an example of a validation message that triggers if a field value is empty. Solution: To implement this functionality, you need to perform the following steps: Step 1: Create a Script, paste the following script, and check whether the field value is null or empty. You can modify it as per your requirements. See the blog post to Create a Script, Action, and Trigger in Sitecore Content Hub . Step 2: Create an Action and choose the above script. Step 3: Create a Trigger and choose the execution type as “In process”. Select the condition using the respective ...

In continuation of utilizing to Sitecore Content Hub feature, one of our requirements was to embed the Brightcove video in Content. To integrate video in Sitecore Content Hub, the Content Hub Rich Text editor named the CKEditor provides functionality to upload the video to Content Hub and insert the video using the following button. Content Hub utilizes CK editor to edit the HTML content. After further analysis, I found that CKEditor tool only supports certain media providers, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and Spotify. It will not work with custom video links. More information is available here:  Media providers Unfortunately, we do not have any OOTB option to embed the Bright Cove video URL in Content. To work around that I decided that I would embed the video URL using <iframe> tag into the content or other HTML runtime on the save button click. Step 1: Create a new field in the Content Hub to allow the author to enter the video...

It is the most common requirement in Content Hub to set the default values in fields. In this blog post, I will cover setting the default values in Sitecore content Hub DAM and CMP Modules.  DAM (Digital Asset Management) Module: 1. Go to the Manage icon. 2. On the Manage page click on the Pages. 3. On the Pages page in the left panel scroll down to the Create page, and from Layout choose the Creation component. 4. On the Creation Component page select Upload files and click on the Add value option 5. I am setting the default value in the Asset Description field, so I have selected the Description field and set the value 6. Now go to the Create page from the Ribbon bar navigation option and upload an Image and you will get the default value in your description field. CMP (Content Marketing Platform) Module: 1. Go to the Manage icon. 2. On the Manage page click on the Pages. 3. On the Pages page in the left panel scroll down to the Search page...

By default, in Sitecore Content Hub when we export the Content Entity, the exported Excel file includes all the fields. It's quite confusing when we want to read, analyze, and perform any operation on the data. The whole process uses Export Profile in the background. To export only specific fields into the Excel files we need to create a custom Export profile into Sitecore and Sitecore provides this functionality OOTB to create Custom Export profile. The following steps describe how to create a custom export profile for Content Entity and enable that particular export profile on the selection component of the search page. Create Export Profile: 1. Click on the manage icon, in the top right corner and choose the Export Profile option. 2. On the Export profile page, click on "+ Export Profile" and in the Export profile popup fill in the details: Name: Name of the Export Profile Definition: Entity Definition used for t...

In this blog post, I will guide you through the process of adding an Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) components to the content detail page. This addition will enable us to provide comprehensive details of an entity, for example, Entity History and State Flow component that will provide you information about the History of the Entity and State Flow details respectively. Add Entity State Flow Component: 1. Go to the Manage icon. 2. On the Manage page click on the Pages. 3. On the Pages page in the left panel scroll down to the Content Details page and select it. 4. On the Layout tab, scroll down and click on + component to add a new component. 5. In the next popup Enable the Visible option and change the UI visibility type It will be added to the Content Detail page You can click on the State Flow component and change or update the setting as per your requirement, I am leaving it as it is.  Add Entity History Component: 1. On the Pages page, select...

After migrating an application from the SharePoint platform to Sitecore, observed that Marketing Applications such as Experience Analytics, Experience Profile, and Path Analyzer do not display data or an error. Experience Profile: Experience Analytics: Path Analyzer: There can be multiple reasons behind this issue. Any one of these reasons could be the cause, or several might apply to your situation. In this blog post, I will discuss all the possible reasons and provide troubleshooting steps to help you capture and view the Analytics data in Sitecore. 1. Certification Issue: For a deeper exploration of this topic, I have written a separate blog post that addresses this issue in detail. You can find the blog post here: Sitecore Analytics: The Certificate was not Found 2. Experience Profile does not display Data: After addressing the Certification Issue, I can see the analytics data in my Shard0 and Shard1 databases but contact is not displaying in...

One of the frequent challenges we face is the absence of Analytics data in the Sitecore Experience Profile. This issue can be quite frustrating, but there is a solution. In this blog post, I will delve into the reasons behind the "The certificate was not found" problem and explain how to resolve it using Azure Managed Cloud Service PaaS. In this case, The very first step is analyzing logs on the CD and xConnect server. I have checked the xConnect Collection server's log and it seemed to stop, which suggested that there had been some issue with xConnect trying to collect the analytics data. In this case, I have to look into the CD server. I found a lot of xDB-related errors in the CD server, with a similar stack trace as below. Error: xDB unavailable when submitting contact The nested error seems to suggest the error is related to the missing client certificate required for xConnect and xDB communication. The amount of Submit Qu...

The Add New Member option is missing from the Schema page. I have been investigating one of the issues in our Content Hub environment. I tried to recall the steps when I encountered a similar issue, but it resolved itself automatically after some time. Here are the steps I performed: Go to the M.content schema using the Schema option from the dashboard. Select the Settings option from the three-dot menu at the top right corner. Enable the Taxonomy-enabled definition. After enabling this option, the Add new member button disappears, along with the Settings option, making it impossible to disable the setting again. The above screenshot I have taken from different CH environments to elaborate on the issue. Workaround: 1. As a preliminary step, I recommend that you try discarding any changes to the M.Content schema. After doing so, verify if the new members become visible. 2. If it's still not resolved, then this issue belongs to the C...

While working on the Content Hub project I received the requirement to get all the Content Entities of a specific Content Type from the Content Hub. For instance, if your Content Hub contains various types of content entities such as a Blog, Article, and News type and there are multiple entities of each content type. Here I am taking an example of retrieving all the Content Entities of the Blog type. To get the list of all the content types, you can use  Web Client SDK , there is a method to retrieve the single entity using the  Get entities method. Solution: 1. Create a sample console/web application in Visual Studio and add a reference to the Web Client SDK NuGet package (Stylelabs.M.Sdk.WebClient) to your project.  2. Before beginning to write the logic, you should have the Parent ID of the Content Entities that represent the ID of the Content-Type. To find the Content Type ID or Parent ID of a content entity from the Conten...