Tag Archives: asp.net

Site Context for ApiControllers

Solution

The SiteContextAttribute provides the ability to define which site an ApiController should use, for example in the picture above it is setup to use the “Person” site.

    public class SiteContextAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
    {
        protected readonly string SiteName;

        public SiteContextAttribute(string siteName)
        {
            this.SiteName = siteName;
        }

        private SiteContextSwitcher _siteContextSwitcher;
        private LanguageSwitcher _languageSwitcher;
        private DatabaseSwitcher _databaseSwitcher;

        public override void OnActionExecuting(HttpActionContext actionContext)
        {
            base.OnActionExecuting(actionContext);

            var siteContext = SiteContext.GetSite(this.SiteName);

            _siteContextSwitcher = new SiteContextSwitcher(siteContext);
            _databaseSwitcher = new DatabaseSwitcher(siteContext.Database);
            _languageSwitcher = new LanguageSwitcher(LanguageManager.GetLanguage(siteContext.Language));
        }

        public override void OnActionExecuted(HttpActionExecutedContext actionContext)
        {
            _languageSwitcher?.Dispose();
            _databaseSwitcher?.Dispose();
            _siteContextSwitcher?.Dispose();

            base.OnActionExecuted(actionContext);
        }
    }

The code gets the site name, then gets the site context and setups the language, database and site context for the controller.

For example, see below it is it possible to use the Context.Database and also the language of the item will also be correct.

I hope this helps, Alan

How to kill Sitecore – whilst installing an update package

Problem

Whilst installing an update package on the client’s/customer’s development environment the ASP.NET worker process would be killed suddenly. This issue was found on Sitecore 8.1 Update 4.

There was nothing shown in the Sitecore log or in the windows Event log. Therefore I took a Memory dump and investigated the dump using Debug Diagnostic 2 . I found at the bottom of the report 100000’s of lines with the same 4 lines of text, so I assumed there was an infinite loop, which was responsible for using all the memory, and crashing the ASP.NET worker process.

I could not reproduce the error in a clean installation of Sitecore, so I assumed it was due to configuration and or some solution specific code. So I started making a comparison between the customers solution and the clean sitecore and I identified that the following settings where defined twice:

ServerTimeZone
ContentSearch.SearchMaxResults
ContentSearch.DefaultIndexConfigurationPath

showconfig.aspx confirmed this as you can see below.

The first was caused by an error in the solution specific configuration, the remaining were caused by 2 Sitecore includes having the same setting.

Solution

Ensure no settings and or other configuration is duplicate. Typically after I found out what the error was I discovered that Sitecore writes a warning in the log file! Maybe I should pay more attention to warnings.