Experience Sitecore !

Few years ago, I made a walkthrough on setting up search for SXA-based website. However, it does not cover one important thing - out-of-the-box SXA uses two own indexes. As a good practice "one index - one core" it assumes you create two additional cores for each of those indexes.

It is also assuming that you may follow the same principle used for existing Sitecore Solr cores naming them <INSTANCEPREFIX>_sxa_master_index and <INSTANCEPREFIX>_sxa_web_index. But how do you create those cores?

I would like to introduce the easiest way achieving that using Sifon and its existing plugin for creating SXA Solr cores. All you need to do is updating plugins from public repository by executing "Plugins" - "Get Sifon plugins" command.

Once updated, you will see corresponding plugin at the menu:

And that's it! After a bit of waiting Sifon will complete installation of both new cores into a Solr instance references with the selected profile. You'll see the confirmation:

As it prompts, the cores have been created at the named location, managed schema has been also published but you still need to rebuild these new indexes. Sifon also has a plugin for that (fastest, but SPE Remoting must be enabled for that instance):

Alternatively, you can use Control Panel as you normally do:

Confirmation:

Hope this helps enjoying search with SXA which is really taken to the new level!

Objective.

Initially I've had a template called Blog, and several pages of it which are actual blog posts. Now I have created a page called Blog Index, implementing template, partial and page designs of the same name. The obvious purpose of given page is to show the list of blog posts, being able to filter this out by certain criteria, including a new custom one - series. Content authors want to group these blogs posts into series, so that's a grouping by a logical criteria. They also want to to display the most recent higher, but give readers an option to select an order, as well as page size.

Implementation plan

1. Switch to SXA "Live mode" (optional)
2. Create taxonomy categories
3. Create Series interface template
4. Use interface template and update blog posts
5. Create search scope for page template
6. Create computed field
7. Publish, redeploy and re-build indexes
8. Create facets
9. Create filter datasources
10. Make rendering variant for search filters
11. Make rendering variant for search results
12. Place component to partial design
13. Configuring Search Results component
14. Enjoy result!

IMPLEMENTATION

1. Before start, switch web to master, this can be done at /sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform/Settings/Site Grouping/Platform at Database field by setting it to master (dont't forget to publish that particulat item however). Once done, it will use not only master database at published site, but also master indexes.

2. Firstly, let's create Series taxonomy folder under Taxonomy (/sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform/Data/Taxonomy) and populate it with actual series-categories that will be used for filtering:

3. Now I can create interface template to implement series selection. This template will be later used with not just Blogs but also few other page types, that's why I make it an interface and put into shared - /sitecore/templates/Project/Tenant/Platform/Interfaces/Shared/_Series.

Make sure the Source column has correctly set datasource, so that you later will be able to pick up right category under site's Data/Taxonomy/Series folder, as on example below:

Datasource=query:$site/*[@@name='Data']/Taxonomy/Series&IncludeTemplatesForDisplay=Taxonomy folder,Category&IncludeTemplatesForSelection=Category

4. Once done, add _Series interface template to actual page template (Blog in my case). Then one can go to existing blog posts and assign them into series (best with Sitecore PowerShell):

$rootItem = Get-Item master:/sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform;
$sourceTemplate = Get-Item "/sitecore/templates/Project/Tenant/Platform/Pages/Blog";  
$selectedSeries = "{1072C536-0EC2-4EAB-8D98-DC9BF441F30A}";

Get-ChildItem $rootItem.FullPath -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.TemplateName -eq $sourceTemplate.Name } | ForEach-Object {  
        $_.Editing.BeginEdit()
        $_.Fields["Series"].Value = $selectedSeries;
        $_.Editing.EndEdit()
}

Now selecting an item displays which series it belongs to:

5. Create scope under /sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform/Settings/Scopes, call it Blogs and set its field Scope Query to filter out by Blog template ID:

6. Create computed field contentseries at you project to store actual name of Series into index that's in addition to another field in index called series so that automatically indexed by template and stores GUID for series. This is how I implemented it in Platform.Website.ContentSearch.config:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <contentSearch>
      <indexConfigurations>
        <defaultSolrIndexConfiguration>
          <fieldMap>
            <fieldNames>
              <field fieldName="contentseries" returnType="stringCollection" patch:after="*[0]" />
            </fieldNames>
          </fieldMap>
          <documentOptions>
            <fields hint="raw:AddComputedIndexField">
              <field fieldId="{ID-of-Series-field-within-_Series_template}" fieldName="contentseries" returnType="stringCollection" patch:after="*[0]">
                Tenant.Site.Website.ComputedFields.CategoriesField,Tenant.Site.Website
              </field>
            </fields>
          </documentOptions>          
        </defaultSolrIndexConfiguration>
      </indexConfigurations>
    </contentSearch>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

7. Publish this configuration into webfolder, then clean up (you can run PS script below) and rebuild indexes.

stop-service solrServiceName
get-childitem -path c:\PathTo\Solr\server\solr\Platform*\Data -recurse | remove-item -force -recurse
start-service solrServiceName
iisreset /stop
iisreset /start

8. When computed field comes into index, the next step sould be to create Series facets. Please note that facet name should be different from the field name as the one got by template and then facet overwrites it

• For Series - under /sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform/Settings/Facets. The most important field here is Field Name, the value would be contentseries that matched name of field we've created at the previous step
• Also create one for Published date that relies on already existing published_date_tdt field, which is a custom date field presenting in all of my content page templates.

9. Create new datasource items:

• checklist filter called Series under /sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform/Data/Search/Checklist Filter folder and assign its first field to point Series facet created at previous step
• an item for Publication Date under /sitecore/content/Tenant/Platform/Data/Search/Date Filter/Publication Date.

10. Implement Search Filter rendering variant that will contain actual filters. I create that under my custom component Search Content, make two columns and also component variant field into each of them. Assign Filter (Checklist) into first and Filter (Date) into second. Reference datasource items from previous step for each component correspondingly:

11. Implement Search Result rendering variant that will define presentation for each item shown/found:

Noticed Series reference field? That switches context to the item references by Series field, so that I can get a value of actual category under Taxonomy folder.

12. In partial design for Blog Index, drop the following renderings into the canvas: Search content, Sort Results, Page Size and Search Results.

13. Finally, for Search Results component, go to Edit component properties, under SearchCriteria section assign Search results signature to search-results and also select Search scope to match Blogs.

Recently tried to reinstall Sitecore 9.0 update 1 and got the following message:

"Request failed: Unable to connect to remote server" (and the URL which is default https://localhost:8389/solr)

Opening Solr in browser went well, and there were no existing cores that could prevent the installation. Weird...

After experiments, I found out that was an antivirus preventing such requests. Disabling it allowed cores to be installed well and thу rest of install script succeeded.

So, finally, what we all have been waiting for, has happened - Sitecore 9 has been announced and released. To be honest, as an MVP, I already have had an access to a beta of the version 9 of Sitecore since late July. but after an official release, we now can publically talk about that.

So, what has been new:

Runtime for Sitecore 9 is .NET Framework 4.6.2 and most of Sitecore 9 NuGet libraries are built against that version of the framework.

The installation process is the first you meet when trying to play with the platform. And it's worth saying that installation process has been totally reworked. So, welcome Sitecore Install Framework - Powershell modules for install and uninstall and a set of JSON config files that store steps for installing Sitecore. Each of these JSON files relies on a part of installation: xConnect, Solr and Sitecore itself. No SIM support (yet) available, unfortunately.

I mentioned xConnect - that is a new component and probably the largest architectural change for the platform - a framework that allows you to read and write analytics data to xDB and search providers, keeping collections, processing, search (Solr) and reporting behind itself. Previously we have had 4 different APIs used to deal with xDB contact, depending on its state, so that entire method full of if /else clauses looked monstrous. Since now we do not do direct xDB calls and operate using XConnectClient. That allows updating contacts from any channel at any time and automatic indexing of data. Sitecore XP introduces client certificate authentication in order to communicate with xConnect server, that is a Windows service. Also, a good thing is that this framework is well documented.

SQL Server 2016 becomes the only storage for all Sitecore databases - content data, xDB, marketing, processing, reporting etc. If you are desperate to keep Mongo - nothing to worry about it is still possible to do, or you may store in the cloud with Microsoft Azure SQL or Azure DocumentDB.

Solr is now search provider by default, and it is also required for installation by Sitecore Installation Framework. Sitecore 9.0 supports version 6.6.2 and sorry not for having version 7.+ of Solr. It is commonly used to install Solr as a windows service, using nssm as the easiest.