How to Adjust the SameSite Attribute of the Authentication Cookie in a Sitecore Commerce Solution with a Federated Payment Provider

Few weeks ago Google Chrome has started to gradually enforce a new behavior for the SameSite attribute of cookies on its latest stable version of the browser, Chrome version 80. This is also when the checkout process in the Sitecore Commerce 9.1 solution of one of my clients started to fail.

In this blog post I will describe the steps taken to troubleshoot and reproduce this issue, the requirements to manage the SameSite attribute in a .NET solution and its compatibility with Sitecore, and finally the implemented solution to adjust the SameSite attribute value of the authentication cookie.

Sitecore Docker: How to Restore Databases Using Backups in a SQL Container

I have been experimenting with running Sitecore on Docker containers for a couple of months now and I am having a lot of fun with it. If you work with many clients at the same time like I do, running Sitecore on Docker brings the big benefit to setup and spin up a client environment in few minutes, simplifying the local environment setup process and eliminating the conflicts that might rise hosting multiple versions of Sitecore instances on a single host machine. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend to do it.

In this blog post I will describe how to override the default command executed in a Docker container running a sitecore-<topology>-sql image to restore Sitecore databases using SQL database backups generated from a non-Docker SQL server.

The Sitecore Commerce 9.3 On-Premises Installation Has Never Been So Fast

The Sitecore Hackathon 2020 starts in less than 48 hours and I am getting ready to participate for my second consecutive year with my team, The Prod Squad. One important recommended task to execute before the contest starts is to setup a local development environment, installing the required version of the Sitecore platform. This year the implemented module should be based on Sitecore XP 9.3 and, if you are considering commerce, it should be based on Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.3.

I don’t know yet if we are going to develop a module on Sitecore Commerce this year, but last night I decided to get ready for it and try to install it on my laptop. I have done a good number of Sitecore Commerce 9.1 on-premises installations in the last few months and a lot of manual steps, hacks and fixes were involved to make the installation successful.

Last night I installed Sitecore Commerce 9.3 on my laptop and I managed the entire installation process, including prerequisites installation and parameters configuration, in less than 2 hours! I have encountered only a couple of issues during the installation process and I will describe them in this blog post, starting with some tips that will make your installation process smoother.

Troubleshooting No Results in Sitecore Commerce Business Tools Searches

All searches in the Sitecore Commerce Business Tools application of one of my clients were not working and no results were returned at all. In my first blog post about Sitecore Commerce, I am going to share some knowledge that I learned about the search functionality available in Business Tools and the troubleshooting steps that I took to identify the root cause of this issue.

Migration to Coveo Cloud: Lessons Learned While Troubleshooting an Issue with the Security Identities Permissions Synchronization

Few weeks ago my colleagues and I have concluded a project for one of our clients to migrate their search hosting indexing solution from the Coveo Enterprise Search on-premises platform to the modern Coveo Cloud platform. The search solution on the website was implemented using the Coveo for Sitecore module, version 4. In this blog post I am going to share the details of an issue that we have experienced with the security identities permissions synchronization and the lessons learned while troubleshooting it.

Extensions to the WFFM Conversion Tool to support popular Sitecore Forms modules on the Sitecore Marketplace

The latest release of the WFFM Conversion Tool is now available on its GitHub repository and it offers an exciting new feature among the new introduced changes. This version introduces the ability to extend the conversion capabilities of the tool to support the conversion of Web Forms For Marketers (WFFM) items to custom Sitecore Forms items added by using Sitecore modules available on the Sitecore Marketplace.

WFFM Conversion Tool: the new automated solution to convert Sitecore Web Forms For Marketers items and data to Sitecore Forms

Last year the Sitecore Web Forms For Marketers (WFFM) module was officially deprecated with the release of Sitecore XP 9.1. Sitecore Forms has become the only supported option for content authors to build marketing forms in Sitecore. While this was not a disruptive news for any new green field website project, this announcement had a relatively big impact on existing Sitecore web applications that used the Sitecore WFFM module, and wanted to upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore. The only upgrade option was to manually recreate the marketing forms using Sitecore Forms, spending a good amount of time and leaving the saved WFFM forms data behind.

Well…Until now!

How to recover a corrupted Sitecore Web database without having access to the SQL Server

Last Friday night one of my clients’ websites went down. Yes, on a Friday night. Why do websites go down usually outside normal business hours? I don’t know why. A Murphy’s Law would definitely explain it saying that “whatever can go down, will go down on a Friday night“.

In case you have to deal with the same issue in the future, I want to share with you my experience and the steps that I followed to recover a corrupted Sitecore web database in the particular circumstances of not having direct access to the SQL server where the corrupted database was managed.

How I fixed the Sitemap XML module to exclude pages with restricted access in a scaled Sitecore website

Few weeks ago I was working on a sitemap implementation for a website still using Sitecore 8.2 and I decided to use one of the available modules on the Sitecore Marketplace. I chose the Sitemap XML module because I was already familiar with the tool and I had already verified that it was compatible with this version of Sitecore.

An important requirement, that I was looking for, was the ability to exclude all pages not accessible by anonymous users from the content of the generated sitemap file. It doesn’t make sense to have a search engine to crawl restricted pages of a website, if the content of the actual pages is secured and accessible only by authenticated users with specific roles. The search engine would just crawl the login page or a “no access” page where the web application would redirect the crawling bot to.

Disaster Recovery: Overview of Hot Solutions for Sitecore 9.1 Content Delivery Environments

Have you ever experienced a blue screen of death on your computer? Probably yes, nobody is immune. IT systems that host a Sitecore website are not different and they are vulnerable to failures too. The impact of downtime can be devastating for a business, causing loss of revenue and loss of traffic, and damaging a company’s brand image as well.

Eureka!

A blog about my personal discoveries with Sitecore, .NET, DevOps and more.