Custom Header Icon for your items?

Custom Header Icon for your Items?

On many occasions I have thought it would be nice to be able to display a different icon in the header of an item, rather than the one chosen for the template.  For example you might want a different icon based on the some status or perhaps an image relating to the item context.  For example a head-shot of a member of staff.

In this example I will show you how I change the header icon based on an image field on that item.  But hopefully you will see that the possibilities are endless.

The example I am using is based on an import I built, that created faculty/staff items in the content tree, for an educational institution.  I thought it would be a nice touch to display the faculty member's image as the header icon, if there was an image attached to the item.

What am I changing?

This processor will switch out the icon shown top left of the image below with a custom image:

And the end result:

 

How do you do it?

We need to add our pipeline processor to the Render Content Editor Header pipeline, which needs to come before the Add Title pipeline processor:

<pipelines>
	<renderContentEditorHeader>
		<processor type="MyProject.Feature.Image.Processors.GetEditorIcon, MyProject.Feature.Image"
		           patch:before="processor[@type='Sitecore.Shell.Applications.ContentEditor.Pipelines.RenderContentEditorHeader.AddTitle, Sitecore.Client']" resolve="true" />
	</renderContentEditorHeader>
</pipelines>

And here's the custom processor:

namespace MyProject.Feature.Image.Processors
{
	public class GetEditorIcon
	{
		private readonly ISitecoreService _sitecoreService;

		public GetEditorIcon(ISitecoreServiceFactory sitecoreServiceFactory)
		{
			_sitecoreService = sitecoreServiceFactory.CreateInstance();
		}

		public void Process(RenderContentEditorHeaderArgs args)
		{
			Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");
			var item = args.Item;
			using (var htmlTextWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(new StringWriter()))
			{
				var imageBuilder = new ImageBuilder();

				if (item.TemplateID == Constants.MemberDetailsPage)
				{
					var provider = _sitecoreService.GetItem<FacultyStaffMember>(item.ID.Guid);
                    
					if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(provider?.FacultyMemberProfileImage?.Src))
					{
						var src = provider.FacultyMemberProfileImage.Src;

						var urlString =
							new UrlString(src + "?height=32&width=32")
							{
								["rev"] = item[FieldIDs.Revision],
								["la"] = item.Language.ToString()
							};
						imageBuilder.Src = urlString.ToString();
						imageBuilder.Class = "scEditorHeaderIcon";
						htmlTextWriter.Write("<span class=\"scEditorHeaderIcon\">");
						htmlTextWriter.Write(imageBuilder.ToString());
						htmlTextWriter.Write("</span>");

						//Remove other icon added
						args.Parent.Controls.Clear();
						args.EditorFormatter.AddLiteralControl(args.Parent, 
                        	                    htmlTextWriter.InnerWriter.ToString());
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

The process method does the following:

• Checks the template of the item to ensure that it is using the template we are wanting to update.
• We then get the item (in this case using GlassMapper), but you could just use the Sitecore item
• We then build the image HTML and replace the Sitecore one in the header

This processor gets called every time the item is refreshed in the Content Editor.

Error when using ajax.js (Commerce) and JSON.parse

I found an issue today with the ajax.js file that comes with Sitecore Commerce in Sitecore 9.2.  

I was trying to get a third party js component (Chute) working in Sitecore which loads scripts dynamically, but the component wouldn't display any content.  This particular component displays images in either a carousel or grid.  But after the initial load nothing appeared except for an error in my browser console:

TypeError: data is null  ajax.js:  156:24

This same component worked without any issue, in a non-commerce environment.

After some investigations, it became apparent that the issue was down to the fact that somewhere in the Js files supplied with Commerce the standard JSON.parse function was replaced with a custom function. 

Unfortunately it was missing a null check inside the new function.  I know that as developer we all do this...  However, I wanted to highlight the issue, to save someone some grief when trying to figure out what is going on...

The file in question can be found in the Sitecore content tree here: /sitecore/media library/Base Themes/Commerce Services Theme/Scripts/ajax

Once you download the media content you will get a script called ajax.js.

The offending code @ line 156, can be found just after the JSON.parse equals statement in the block of code shown below:

(function (root, factory) {
    'use strict';
    if (typeof define === 'function' && define.amd) {
      // use AMD define funtion to support AMD modules if in use
      define(['exports'], factory);
    } else if (typeof exports === 'object') {
      // to support CommonJS
      factory(exports);
    }

    // browser global variable
    var AjaxService = {};
    root.AjaxService = AjaxService;
    factory(AjaxService);
  })(this, function (AjaxService) {
    'use strict';

    // Hack >>
    // When debugging is on, Sitecore is returning extra information, we need to strip it from the JSON string
    var jsonParseRef = JSON.parse;

    JSON.parse = function (data) {

      var debugIndex = data.indexOf('<div title="Click here to view the profile."');
      if (debugIndex > 0) {
        data = data.substring(debugIndex, 0, debugIndex);
      }

      return jsonParseRef(data);
    };

You will see in the above function that JSON.parse is updated with a new function, unfortunately the data variable is not checked for null before being used.

Changing the JSON.parse function to: 

JSON.parse = function (data) {

      if(data==null)return null;

      var debugIndex = data.indexOf('<div title="Click here to view the profile."');

      if (debugIndex > 0) {
        data = data.substring(debugIndex, 0, debugIndex);
      }

      return jsonParseRef(data);
    };

Fixes the issue.

Hopefully this might help someone.

TDS Model Inheritance

Team Development for Sitecore Model Inheritance

For a long time now I have been trying to find a way to have TDS models inherit across the Helix architecture.

I found this link on StackOverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31711197/sitecore-tds-multi-project-properties-base-template-reference-not-working-for-me

And thought it worth re-posting - Thanks to Rohan for figuring out how to do this!

All you have to do is to update Helpers.tt in the TDS project that needs to inherit base, as follows:

public static string GetNamespace(string defaultNamespace, SitecoreItem item, bool includeGlobal = false)
{
    List namespaceSegments = new List();
    // add the following line
    namespaceSegments.Add(!item.ReferencedItem ? defaultNamespace : "[BaseProjectNameSpace]");
    // remove this line - namespaceSegments.Add(defaultNamespace);
    namespaceSegments.Add(item.Namespace);
    string @namespace = AsNamespace(namespaceSegments); // use an extension method in the supporting assembly

    return (includeGlobal ? string.Concat("global::", @namespace) : @namespace).Replace(".sitecore.templates", "").Replace("_", "");
} 

Make sure that you replace the above [BaseProjectNameSpace] with your base projects namespace. 

Also make sure you update the Multi-Project  properties for your TDS project so that it references the base project: