Friday, January 30, 2015

My footsteps on Sitecore 7.5 Upgrade Steps

Recently, I worked on a Sitecore 7.5 upgrade project. Since it was released very recently, the documentation was not that clear. So, I had to ask lot of help/questions from Sitecore support also.

Anyway, with the help of Sitecore Support, we were able to do the sitecore 7.5 upgrade successfully. Following are the final order of upgrade steps that I came up with.



  1. Upgrade Sitecore CMS to 7.2 Initial Release
  2. Run ECM Upgrade tool (Email Campaign Manager v.2.2 rev.141007 upgrade tool)
  3. Upgrade Sitecore CMS to 7.5
  4. Run Analytics Data Optimization Tool
  5. Upgrade ECM
  6. Run Analytics Data Conversion Tool (with ECM and WFFM command line options). You also need to ..
    • copy ECM conversion plugin files directly inside the <Analytics data conversion tool folder>
    • copy WFFM conversion plugin files directly inside the <Analytics data conversion tool folder>\Plugins
  7. ECM Post Installation Steps
  8. Upgrade remaining modules


Hope someone will find this useful. :-)

Monday, January 19, 2015

Enter special characters as input to WFFM form fields

One of my colleagues asked me about how can we allow to enter special characters (like &) into WFFM form fields. When you try to submit special characters (ex: &, >, <) with WFFM form, it returns following error message.



Reason for this warning message is, Access Security Validation that is added to every WFFM form by default.



More than a year back, I had a ticket created for the same issue with sitecore support and following is the solution/workaround they provided.

** refer "UPDATE 17/11/2015" at the bottom of the page for new kb article

Sitecore Solution :

Remove the Assess Security Risk verification action from the web form:
1.In the Content Editor, on the ribbon, on the View tab, select the Raw Values check box.
2.Select the item of the web form that you want to edit.
3.In the Submit section, in the Check Actions field, remove the <li> node containing the ID of the Assess Security Risk action - {2D5B5061-747A-4477-BD41-E746EAFEB231}


But, I thought of looking for a different solution to solve this issue. So, I had a quick look into the Sitecore.Forms.Custom.dll file and saw that it is a small adjustment that we need to do to achieve our requirement.



So, copy the Sitecore.Form.Submit.AssessSecurityRisk class from Sitecore.Forms.Custom.dll and insert it to our own class.
Then, change/remove the characters that needed to be included from the validation code
Then, duplicate the "/sitecore/system/Modules/Web Forms for Marketers/Settings/Actions/Form Verification/Assess Security Risk" item



 Change the "Assembly" and "Class" field value to map our newly created custom class

This allow us to only remove the necessary characters from the "Assess Security Risk" validation and keep all other default validations intact.

Update :
When you need to edit the "Form Verification" field value, you need to change the content editor to display "Raw values" for the fields, and then replace the id value (marked in green color text) with the ID of the newly created custom Form Verification item.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><li xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">  <g id="{10FE9225-5E6C-4896-9CD2-880D6D48C4CC}" displayName="Check Actions">    <li id="{2D5B5061-747A-4477-BD41-E746EAFEB231}" unicid="89F18F7C96F4469A9470057CE421A115">     <parameters></parameters>    </li>  </g></li>


UPDATE 17/11/2015 : 
Sitecore has come up with a solution which encodes these restricted characters when WFFM form is submitted.
https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/568572


Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Sitecore Modules Compatibility Table


I was in discussion with Sitecore Support regarding Sitecore 8 upgrade process and they point me to a very useful webpage. I found this webpage very useful and thought to share it with you. (Maybe you already know this :-D )



This page contains all the module compatibility with sitecore versions.


Points about Update Installation Wizard

Today, while I'm browsing/searching on SDN, I found a documentation around Update Installation Wizard tool. I have used this tool on most occasions (mainly doing upgrades) and thought of writing the important points here.

Document Link : http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sdn5/resources%20misc/tools/update%20installation%20wizard/update_installation_wizard_guide-a4.pdf#search=%22Sitecore%22

Update Package

  • used to update sitecore solutions
  • contains items, files and metadata about items or files to be added/deleted and changed
  • contain information about the expected value of fields and has values for files, making it possible to identify potential conflicts
  • extension ".update"
  • CANNOT be installed using the Installation wizard that is available in the Sitecore Desktop

Accessing the Update installation wizard

http://<host_name>/sitecore/admin/UpdateinstallationWizard.aspx

Post Update Installation Steps

  • rebuild the search indexes and the links database
  • configuration files will be saves with a different name (Ex: web.config.sitecore_6.1.0_rev.090630)