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Sitecore Logging

Sitecore Logging

One of the advantages of using a platform like Sitecore over completely bespoke development, is the number of features that are built-in that day to day you completely take for granted. An important one of those is logging.

If you're building a bespoke application, adding some sort of support for generating log files can be a bit of a pain. Granted there are solutions that can be added to your project that do most of the lifting for you, but you still need to think about it, decide which to use and understand how to use it. With Sitecore the ability to write to a log file has been built in along with the logic that's going to delete old log files and stop your servers hard disk filling up. Under the hood Sitecore is using Log4Net to generate log files, a side effect of this is that config changes can not be made using patch files.

Logs are written to the logs folder within your data folder. If your on Sitecore 8.2 or below this will be adjacent to your website folder. If your on Sitecore 9 or using Sitecore PaaS this will be in the App_Data folder within your sites folder.

The different log files

Sitecore generates 6 different log files while it's running, these are:

Log - A general log file which you can write to
Crawling - Logs from the Sitecore Search Providers for crawling
Search - Logs from the Sitecore search providers for searches
Publishing - Logs generated during Sitecore publishes
FXM - Logs from federated experience manager
WebDAV - A log for WebDAV activity

Customizing the amount of detail

At different times you will likely want to see a different amount of detail in your log files. For instance on a production server you will want to keep logs to a minimum to maximise performance. However in a different environment where you are trying to debug an issue you would want all the logs you can get.

For this reason when writing a log a priority level is assigned and each log file can be configured to only write logs at a certain level or below to disk.

Priority levels are:

  1. DEBUG
  2. INFO
  3. WARN
  4. ERROR
  5. FATAL

To configure what level of logging should be output, configure the priority value in the log4net section of the web.config file.

1<log4net>
2  <appender name="LogFileAppender"
3            type="log4net.Appender.SitecoreLogFileAppender, Sitecore.Logging">
4    <file value="$(dataFolder)/logs/log.{date}.txt" />
5    <appendToFile value="true" />
6    <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
7      <conversionPattern value="%4t %d{ABSOLUTE} %-5p %m%n" />
8    </layout>
9  </appender>
10  <root>
11    <priority value="INFO" />
12    <appender-ref ref="LogFileAppender" />
13  </root>
14</log4net>

Writing to the log file

Writing to the log file is super easy to do from within your Sitecore application. The Sitecore.Diagnostics.Log class contains static functions to write to the general log file at different priority levels.

1// Writes a log at the error priority level 
2Sitecore.Diagnostics.Log.Error("That wasn't meant to happen", this);
Cloud Hosting IaaS vs PaaS

Cloud Hosting IaaS vs PaaS

A topic I hear from clients fairly regularly these days is a plan to move to "the cloud", or we take over a site built by someone else that's hosted in "the cloud". However in virtually every case it's an IaaS setup and they don't really know what the difference between IaaS and PaaS is.

What is IaaS?

So what is infrastructure as a service (IaaS for short)? To put it quite simply, IaaS in the cloud, be that Azure or AWS takes away the burden of managing your own or rented servers.

Anyone who's worked in a corporate environment can tell you getting some new servers can be a lengthy process. Someone needs to arrange for them to be purchased, placed in a physical location, software installed etc. Even when the management of this has been outsourced to another company, it still remains a lengthy process.

Equally anyone working for a small company can tell you its not much better. There may be a lot less approval processes to jump through, but your on your own trying to buy and set up this kit from somewhere.

IaaS solves this by providing a very very quick service where you request a specific setup and a VM gets created for you ready to go in a couple of minutes. You can pick from a range of locations around the world and when you don't need it any more you turn it off. There's no large commitments to keeping a server for 6 months, you pay by the minute scaling up and down as needed.

IaaS is very simple to replace your current setup as its essentially the same thing just with much better management control around it.

What is PaaS?

Platform as a service (PaaS), is what people really mean when they talk about the future and the cloud. If you go to a conference and hear Microsoft talk about Azure, you can be 99% certain its a PaaS service they're talking about.

To understand it think about the process of getting some office space. You could buy a plot of land, have a building placed on it and turn it into your office. But when the roof leaks you'll need to arrange for that to be fixed, you'll need to arrange regular fire alarm tests to make sure everyone remains safe, and when an issue is discovered in the buildings security you'll need to get that fixed to. You didn't really want to be a building manager, but that's what's happened.

The alternative is to rent some office space and leave the management to somebody else. All you have to do is follow some rules like don't go on the roof and don't go in that cupboard where all the fire alarm equipment is.

PaaS is a bit like this, we didn't really want a box running Windows Server that we need to keep secure and up to date. We just want a SQL Server DB and that traditionally comes with a need to have a server to run it on. Equally for hosting a website we really just want somewhere our sites going to run, in the same way that for office space we just want somewhere for our staff to sit. It's unlikely that we're ever going to use these servers for more than one purpose so we don't really need a generic system that allows us to install a multitude of things.

So with PaaS rather than buying a server your buying a service, which could be a web application, a db or many other things. As this is no longer just buying server space there are a number of restrictions. For example with a web application saving anything on the file system is rules out. Your application is going to be there but part of what makes it possible for all the server updates to be done for you is that at any time your application could be moved to a brand new server, anything not in the package to set it up will be lost.

Custom Experience Buttons vs Edit Frames in Sitecore

Custom Experience Buttons vs Edit Frames in Sitecore

So your going that extra mile and fully supporting the experience editor in your Sitecore solution, but how do you support a WYSIWYG editor when a field isn't actually visible, or you need to provide the ability to edit a complex field type such as a drop-down or a multi-list?

The solution is to use either Edit Frames or Custom Experience Buttons, both of which will display a dialog containing the fields to edit. The difference between them comes down to where the toolbar containing a button will appear.

Edit Frames require extra code to be added to your view and are designed to surround a section(s) of your view. Custom Experience buttons however appear on the existing tool bar that's shown when you select a component in the experience editor.

Edit Frame

With an edit frame you can surround a section of html within your view with a clickable target, that will display a toolbar with a button to launch the dialogue.

To set up an edit frame:

  • In the core database navigate to /sitecore/content/Applications/WebEdit/Edit Frame Buttons and create a new item based on Edit Frame Button Folder. This folder will be referenced in your view for the collection of buttons to be displayed.
  • Under the new folder create a new item based on Field Editor Button and give it the name of your button.
  • On your button item make sure you set an icon and the list of fields the button should allow the content editor to edit. These should be pipe separated.
  • In Visual Studio open the view for your rendering
  • Add a reference to Sitecore.Mvc.Extensions
  • Surround the section to show the button with a using block as follows:
1@using (Html.BeginEditFrame(RenderingContext.Current.ContextItem.Paths.FullPath, "Button Folder Name", "Toolbar Title"))
2{
3      // HTML here
4}
  • You will now see a toolbar appear in the experience editor
  • Clicking the icon will load a dialogue to edit the listed fields

Custom Experience Buttons

Custom experience buttons differ to edit frames in that you do not need to add any code to your views. Rather than having 1 or more clickable areas in your view the button will appear on the toolbar for the entire component. This makes them beneficial when the field doesn't directly relate to a section in the view. e.g. for editing a background video that may span the entire components background.

To set up a custom experience button:

  • In the core database navigate to /sitecore/content/Applications/WebEdit/Custom Experience Buttons and create a new item based on Field Editor Button.
  • On your button item make sure you set an icon and the list of fields the button should allow the content editor to edit. These should be pipe separated.
  • Switch to the master DB and navigate to the rendering item for your component
  • In the field for Experience Editor Buttons select the new button
  • Selection the component will now show the additional button on the toolbar
  • Clicking the icon will load a dialogue to edit the listed fields
The importance of build numbers

The importance of build numbers

If I were to make a prediction, I would say that build numbers are something that are rarely treated as being important in the agency world of web development. That's not to say milestone releases aren't given names like "Phase 2", "August Release" or a major feature name, but every build / release of a project in between, I'd sense largely have build numbers either ignored or never created.

It's also easy to see why, after all it's not like we're producing software that's going out to the masses to be installed. The solution is essentially just ending up having 1 install on a set of servers. When a new version is built, that replaces everything that came before it and if a bug is found we generally roll forward and fix the bug rather than ever reverting back.

Why use build numbers?

So when we're constantly coding and improving applications in an agile world why should we care about and use build numbers?

To put it quite simply its just an easy way to identify a snapshot of code that could have actually have been built and then released to a server. This becomes hugely useful in scenarios such as:

  • A bug being reported by an end user
  • An issue being identified by some performance monitoring
  • An issue being picked up in some functionality further on from the site. e.g. in an integration

Without build numbers the only way to react to these scenarios is to look at commit dates in source control or manual release notes that may have been created to try and work out where an issue may have been created and what changed at that time. If the issue had subsequently been fixed you also can't really give a version description when it was fixed other than a rough date.

Other advantages of build numbers can include:

  • Being able to reference a specific version that has been pen tested
  • Referencing a version that's been tested with integrations
  • Having approval to release a specific version rather than just the latest on master
  • Anywhere you want to have a conversation referencing releases

Build numbers for deploys

The first step to use build numbers and with the rise in CI, possibly the one thing most people are doing is to start creating build numbers via a build server. By using any type of build server you will end up with build numbers. This instantly gives you a way to know when a build was created and what commits were new within the build.

Start involving an automated deployment setup either using your build server or with other tools like Octopus Deploy and you will now start to get a record of when each build was deployed to each server.

Now you have an easy way to not only reference what build was on each environment and when through the deploy history, but also a way to see what went into a build through the build servers change log.

Tag builds in source control

Being able to see the changes that went into each build on your build server is all very good, but it's still not an ideal situation for finding the exact code version a build relates to.

Thankfully if your using Team City it's really easy to set it up to create a tag in your source control with each build number. Simply go to the build features section of your projects configuration and add a feature called "VCS Labeling". This is a step that happens post build in the background and will create a tag in source control including the build number. It has lots of other configuration options, so if you need different tag formats for different branches its got you covered.

If your using GitHub once this is turned on you will be able to see a list of all the tags in the releases section.

Update Assembly info

Being able to identify a build in source control and view a history of what should have been on a server at a particular time is all very good, but its also a good idea to be able to easily identify a build for a published version of code. That way just by looking at the code on a server you can tell which build version it is, and not rely on your deployment tool to be correct.

If your using Team City this also also made super simple through a build feature called "Assembly info patcher". When using this the build number will automatically get patched in without having to edit AssemblyInfo.cs.

Conclusion

By following these tips you will now be able to identify a version by looking at the published code, see a history of when each version was not only built but also released to each environment and also have an easy way to find the exact source for that build.

The build number can then be used in any conversations around when a bug was introduced and also be referenced in release notes so everyone can keep track of what versions included what fix's in a simple to understand format.