Reformatting config XML so it’s easier to diff

Every so often pretty much every developer ends up in a situation where they’re looking at a bug that manifests on one platform, but not on another. The sort of bug where you end up spending hours looking through log and config files for a subtle difference. I found myself looking into just this sort of bug recently, but on a site where (to my frustration) the config files were full of comments and whitespace differences across platforms that made diffing really hard^**. Spotting that subtle bug-causing difference is pretty much impossible when your diff is full of noise… So how can we fix that?

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Remember the routing if you want to reverse-proxy on a Sitecore site

Ever been asked to set up a Reverse Proxy to allow a particular URL on your website to fetch its content from a site somewhere else? It’s not an uncommon requirement, but it seems to cause some configuration challenges too. Having been drafted in to solve some issues with just such a setup recently, here’s a quick description of the stuff I need to remember next time I get this job:

You can have “Solr as a Service” now…

Recently I was writing about the changes to Java licensing that Oracle are enforcing in 2019. It’s not an uncommon reaction to the challenges that the new license introduces to start thinking about alternatives to how you might manage search for your Sitecore deployments. So what can you do?

Why are my pages under /services/ broken?

This is one of those issues where I feel like I should have worked it out faster than I did. Computers are relentlessly logical. If you tell them to ignore something, they’re going to ignore it, even if that does confuse your content editors…

A fast query edge case that might bite you

There’s been a bit of discussion (I might even go as far as to say ranting 😉 ) on the subject of not using “fast query” in your website code recently. I’m a supporter of this idea – but I came across an issue recently that points out why it’s not always easy to be confident that you’re not making use of it indirectly…

So, for the benefit of Google:

xConnect config files can be confusing

Edited to add: Sitecore have updated their documentation to reduce the confusion here. Thank you Martina & co!

I’m working on my first proper Sitecore 9 project at the moment, and got bitten by an annoying bit of confusion while doing some configuration work. If you’re tweaking how xConnect works take note, and hopefully you can avoid making the same mistake I did…

Why am I still missing some GeoIP data?

Recently I wrote about an issue I encountered where a client’s website was missing its GeoIP data (and the related back-end analytics data) entirely. While the changes discussed in that post solved the problem of there being no MongoDB data for GeoIP lookups at all, I continued to see odd issues with many users not being located after those fixes were made. Sorting this out seems to suggest that some of the “common wisdom” about configuring GeoIP for analytics isn’t right – so here are my latest findings: