Reducing Sitecore SQL Server Calls by 7-10x with a Caching Data Provider

While profiling a Sitecore XM/XP 10.x solution I noticed something that made me do a double take. Hundreds of SQL calls per single page request. Not complex queries either - simple, repetitive child item lookups hitting the database over and over again.

This turned out to be a missed caching opportunity in Sitecore’s SqlServerDataProvider. Specifically, the GetChildIdsByName method gets called every time Sitecore needs to resolve a child item by name under a given parent. On a content-heavy site with deep trees and lots of renderings, that adds up fast.

App settings in environment variables in Sitecore.

Creating back-end integrations is inevitably linked with having to authenticate against a remote endpoint. Be that a Rest API, FTP or an APM - secrets (credentials, api tokent, shared secrets) of some sort will be involved in the process.

Those credentials must be stored somewhere. At this point I hope no one even considers hardcoding those but even if you extract them to configuration - having them exposed in your repository may be a bad idea and is frowned upon by tools like SonarQube.

Roll out multilingual item branches en masse using Sitecore PowerShell Extensions

I’ve received this nice comment on one of my earlier posts and I thought it might warrant a blog post since it is a nice little challenge and might be useful for more scripters in our community.

Hi Adam, thanks for the pointers on PowerShell! There’s one in particular I’m hoping to get some help with, if that’s ok? I have created a Branch Template in Sitecore, and I want to deploy it under every item in the Content Tree that uses one particular page template (about 200 instances of deployment, in this case). For an added bit of fun, there will be several different language versions being deployed along the way, so I guess that prevents me doing a blanket rollout. Could you please recommend a script that is along the lines of “Add this Branch Template under this Item ID in the following named language codes”? I realise I would then be repeating that line 200 times with varying parent item ID and languages, but I can live with that if that’s the easiest way to do it. Many thanks for your help! Phil Neale

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Do not turn Sitecore Media Request protection off and protect older Sitecore versions with ImageGuard

The post is related to the image resize vulnerability fix introduced in Sitecore 7.5. To read more about the Sitecore fix go to the Release notes page and search for ?Media request protection?. While I was holding off for a number of months on the publication of the post as it puts the attack vector in plainer sight that I would like it to be (while the community figured out how to work with Media Resizing in a neat way) - but recently I’ve seen voices raised considering turning the Media Request protection off which I hope you will not be doing after reading this post. The post will also tell you how to enable such security on your older versions of Sitecore. So here’s the story…. At some point in Cognifide we have performed a research around Sitecore security and one of my colleagues (Marek)  found out that you could easily kill any Sitecore instance by performing an image resize attack on it. While the CMS did some rudimentary checks and limited the values of height and width you could still perform an attack by harvesting the images from the site and perform multiple parallel & iterative size increase or just plain use the scale parameter to achieve any image size. A result of such attack would be a a denial of service due to 100% CPU & memory usage and would potentially allow for filling the server drive by creating the endless number of scaling calls. Marek was even kind enough to provide a proof of concept code that confirmed the hypothesis by performing attack on a few of our internal servers. The program would load the home page; parse to find images linked from it and perform resizing of the images in a number threads.

Turn your Sitecore PowerShell reports into applications with Action Scripts

In one of my previous posts I described how to create reports in Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE for short) that allow you to leverage the joint power of Sitecore and PowerShell to deliver complete and elegant reports in little to no time. In this post I’ll tell you how to take this a step further and operationalize them into full blown Sitecore Desktop applications. The secret sauce is in the actions you can place on the report, the additional parameters that I haven’t mentioned in the previous post, and the use of Sitecore rules engine with some rules that come with SPE. For the purpose of this post I will limit the scripts to samples that are (mostly) in the vanilla SPE deployment. Let’s begin with describing the actions and how you can configure them to appear in your reports.

Rapid API prototyping for Sitecore with PowerShell Extensions

This post describes how you can deliver JSON/XML/HTML APIs quickly with Sitecore PowerShell Extensions. Technically this was also available earlier but the API was not refined to the state it is now. As Sitecore is constantly progressing from predominantly serving as a  CMS towards becoming a mobile and web application delivery platform (which is very apparent by the recent increase of SPEAK popularity, the introduction of Item Web API and the app centric nature of the new Sitecore 8 interface there is an increased need to rapidly deliver APIs for those those front end applications to work seamlessly with the CMS back-end. PowerShell Extensions can help you with that move by enabling rapid prototyping of APIs that are either JSON or XML in nature.

Using Sitecore Content Search in PowerShell Extensions

This is just a short post to supplement the “Working with Sitecore items in PowerShell Extensions” as we now have a new cmdlet of retrieving items in SPE 3.0. Find-Item cmdlet allows you to leverage the glorious new search API Sitecore introduced in the 7.0 version of its CMS to retrieve items using the Sitecore Content Search indexes. You will find the available parameters on it as follows:

Sitecore PowerShell Extensions in numbers

Recently the Sitecore PowerShell Team has been reflecting on the progress of the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions (SPE) module. We appreciate all the feedback and contributions from the community. Without the many great people in the community, the module just wouldn’t be where it is today. The team is proud of the accomplishments for a module developed purely by the community with no formal Sitecore support. The new year has revealed some exciting news out on the Marketplace for SPE.

Set up Sitecore PowerShell Extensions development environment

Since we’ve seen some interest from developers wanting to join the Sitecore PowerShell Extensions team, I thought it might be worth documenting how my development environment is put together to allow for easier on-boarding of new members (Yes, we’re hiring! No, we can’t pay you ;) ). Maybe you just want to compile it yourself to make sure we’re not up to no good, or just plain see inside and play with it… First of all you need to have Sitecore installed somewhere (obviously). For the purpose of examples I’ll assume your instance is located at *C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Sitecore8* and has the 3 standard folders Data, Databases and Website in them as it normally has. For that very same reason I’ll also assume that your Sitecore PowerShell Extensions project folder is located at *C:\Projects\SitecorePowerShell*

Upgrading your Sitecore PowerShell Extensions from 2.x to 3.x - what you need to know

I’m really excited to see the 3.0 version of Sitecore PowerShell Extensions released. There have been more effort, love and sweat poured into this version by the whole team than I would ever expect. This blog has been written to assert the smoothest upgrade experience possible. While we’re always striving for the smoothest upgrade possible - this version introduces some changes that require you to perform a manual step or two. While those could be automated to a degree, making those manual was a conscious choice as I didn’t want to break e.g. your Insite instance that stores some of its files in the “Console” sub-folder of the Website folder. Before upgrading your instance from Sitecore PowerShell Extensions 2.x to 3.0 please make sure you have your scripts backed up as the upgrade process might cause some of your scripts to be removed. This is especially true if you used the integration script libraries and you are upgrading from SPE 2.7 or earlier. If you’re upgrading from version 2.8 and your script live in your own modules You should be safe although it’s always smart to back up. The steps you need to take prior or after installing the new version of the PowerShell Extensions: