XPath Builder Done

Well, with a little help from Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, here is the new XPath Builder tool. The only missing feature that I can think of, is a switch to toggle between Sitecore XPath and "real" XPath.

That is, the difference between writing:

/sitecore/content/home/*

and

/item[@key='sitecore']/item[@key='content']/item[@key='home']/*



BTW: the code is 120 lines and the XML Layout is 49 lines.

site.config

I have added a small feature for configuring sites outside the web.config - let's see if Ole approves it.

In the site resolver, I have added functionality to look for a site.config file in the current directory. If such a file exists, the site configuration is read from that file. This make it possible to define sites much more flexible (at a cost of course).

Here is an example of a site.config file:
<site
rootPath="/sitecore/content"
startItem="/home"
language="en"
database="core"
domain="sitecore"
loginPage="/sitecore/login"
content="master"
enableWorkflow="true"
xmlControlPage="/sitecore/shell/default.aspx"/>

You can also use a reference to a site defined in the web.config. In that case the site.config file looks like this:

<site reference="shell">

The cost of this is performance. For each request, Sitecore has to check for the existance of a site.config file. If found, the file is read and parsed into an Xml document. While not overly concerning, it does hurt performance slightly.

What it doesn't do: A site.config file does not work recursively on folders. Sitecore does not look for site.config files in parent folders, so you will have to place a site.config in every subfolder. The reason for this is performance.

XPath Builder

I am looking for a good Friday evening project and was thinking about an XPath Builder tool. It seems to me that the biggest problem in getting Xslt files to work is getting the XPaths right.

I was thinking about a tool where you could type in an XPath, set a Context Node and evaluate it. The result (the found items) should be shown in a grid below much like the SQL Server Query Analyzer.

Such a tool would plug nicely into the new Sitecore IDE which we are building at the moment.

Debugger Super Tooltip

We are updating the Debugger to provide more info directly within the actual page.

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like right now:



When the user hovers the mouse over the green triangle this window flies out. Currently it shows various properties, a profile (time taken, items read etc.) and cache settings. We could easily expand on this in the future.

I think this will ease debugging for a lot of developers.

Fresh Start

After having been away for quite a long time, I decided to update my blog.

I have removed all of the articles about Linked Items, as Ole have rewritten the entire code and architecture while I was away.

We are currently working on a massive update of the Sitecore UI. The goal is to provide more screen real-estate for the users and polish some of the rough areas of Sitecore, for instance the Layouter.

Really looking forward to 5.3 - it is going to be the best Sitecore ever!