Here is my scenario.Whenever i want to replicate contents in alfresco to different environment ,I should have the option of choosing files in my content to replicate. Is there anyway where I can put a custom button in alfresco which does the above operation (say "publish to abc environment").Or we have an inbuilt option to choose contents during replication in alfresco.Any links to examples would be helpful
Related
I can use the powershell command: New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment, with a relevant template file to create an instance of all the items within the template. In fact, this is how I initially created some of the components in the current resource group I am working on. Since creating my Azure components I have tweaked things quite a lot, and I would like to create a template based on the setup in my resource group as it stands now, this would allow me to run the above command and to recreate the components if I ever need to.
Can anyone tell me if there is a way to create a template based on an existing resource group?
Looks like there are some MS docs detailing the process here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-manager-export-template
Having toyed with the concept in the past, I am interested in using multivariate testing on my companies Sitecore website. There are a number of places where I feel we can definitely improve sales through the use of A/B testing in:
Running two entirely different templates to see what layouts work better for users
Running a number of different Sublayouts (forms) on the site to see which ones people are more likely to fill out
Trialling different content - Running two different sets of copy to see if users are more likely to stay on the page
I want to use the Marketing Suite within Sitecore, and I want to be able to measure who visits pages more and count, out of two or more sublayout forms, which form is used the most. Sadly, I have no experience with the OMS and am struggling to see how one actually implements these things.
Let's say I have a content item, with a bunch of sublayouts attached to it within its template. Can someone help guide me towards a way of achiving the three things I want to run multivariate testing on?
EDIT: On the subject of the two sublayouts I want to test on a template; I have two sublayouts, which are both simple ASP.NET email forms. Once a user fills in the form the contents of the form are written to a database and an email (using Sitecore.Context.Item to get an "Email From" field from the content item that runs the form).
This is where I get stuck. A number of the sublayouts I have don't seem to have any "content" that needs pulling from a data source. The only content I can see in the case of the two forms I want to test is the "Email To" fields. So, if I were to abstract those away into their own data templates, and then added those as data sources I assume that I would then have to change my code for these to stop using Sitecore.Context.Item?
The point where I get stuck is with the data sources for the Multivariate Test Variables and the data sources for the Sublayouts. If I have two data templates containing the Email fields for each, two sublayouts that contain the forms that need testing and two multivariate variables, what goes where?
I believe you can read about it in the Analytics Configuration Reference (PDF link) under section 2.2.
You essentially create a MV test that wraps over potential data sources of a sublayout. The test then randomly assigns a DataSource, so your sublayouts need to be written to work with a DataSource.
With Sitecore 8 released Multivariate Testing is now supported out of the box as well as AB Testing.
You can run two entirely different templates to see which Layout works best for the user by Page Test in Sitecore's Optimization Tool on the Launch Pad. Creating a Page Test you can select the current version of the Item then create a new Version of the Item with the different Layout. This can also be done for Content on the Page
After that you need to decide how a winner can be chosen e.g. most goals completed by users, registrations etc then Sitecore will automatically run the test for you showing A and B to various users and ultimately choose a winner based on the Test Objective. You can choose a winner mannually or let Sitecore automatically choose after a set Duration.
Creating a Mulitvariate Test on number of different Sublayouts as well as imagery, personalisation, content etc is a little more interesting. To create a Multivariate Test is done via Workflow Actions, I've posted a blog recently how to add Maultivariate Testing to workflow.
Approving with a Test will prompt Sitecore to create a Multivariate Test for all variables (Sublayouts, Content, Personalization etc). It creates an 'Experience' for every possible combination of these variables and tests them against each other.
For a more in-depth explination and guide I have recently posted a tutorial to create a Multivariate Test in Sitecore.
There are two trainings that you (and a developer on your team) should really consider attending: OMS Certified Marketer and OMS .NET Developer.
Working with a Sitecore Certified OMS .NET Developer, you will be able to accomplish your marketing objectives. This is what Sitecore Training is for!
Please see the following and regsiter for the next available trainings:
http://www.sitecore.net/Training/Course-Overview/OMS-11-Certified-Marketer.aspx
http://www.sitecore.net/Training/Course-Overview/OMS-11-NET-Developer.aspx
I have setup a Solr server, now, I have two sites that I want to index and search using SolrNet.
How do I differentiate the two sites' content in Solr?
You may want to take a look at this document: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/MultipleIndexes
I think the best approach is to use Multiple Solr Cores.
Another option is you can simply add a new field that indicates the item's Web site. For example, you can add a field called type.
Searches on website1.com would require you to filter on the type field.
&fq=type:website1.com
That way you only need to deal with one core and one schema.xml file. This works if the pages of both sites have a very similar field set, and it will make it easier to search across both sites if you plan on doing that.
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/MultipleIndexes#Flattening_Data_Into_a_Single_Index
I'm looking for the best solution to allow our users to upload XLS spreadsheet so that they can be used to populate tables in our data warehouse (DW).
Our users are heavy Business Object (BO) users, and BO lets you export to XLS. When they have data in a spreadsheet that needs to be loaded to the DW, they need a process to upload the data in the XLS to the DW's db. As a result, we end up with many of these "interfaces" when I think that what we really need is a programmatic automated feed. Using Excel as a data source for inter-system feeds, in my gut, just seems like a bad idea to me.
Question #1: I'd like to see if you agree and why or why not.
OK, there is no swimming against that tide, so I now take as a given that XLS uploads are here to stay for us. Now I need to find the best solution. First, I'll explain what we do now and then what I don't like about it:
Via web pages, we provide empty XLS files (no rows) with a defined set of columns. Each file is intended to be used to update a different target dest table. In each spreadsheet is an "upload" button. Pushing the Upload button results in the macro in the spreadsheet serializing the contents of the file to CSV and FTPing the data to server folder. Periodically, a scheduler fires off an Informatica ETL job that uses the CSV file as input and loads the data into a custom XLS-specific staging table and then, if the records pass edits, into the appropriate target table. Any errors encountered are logged to an error table. For each XLS file uploaded, the data ends up in a separate staging and error table that is specific for the file.
Some of the things I don't like include about our process are:
1) The macro code in the XLS is too exposed, includes passwords for example, can be tampered with and there are issues ensuring that the users are using the latest XLS templates.
2) Business Rule edits are placed in the ETL program, where they should probably be, but because we would like to catch the errors ASAP, i.e, in the spreadsheet, edits are also added to the macro code. This results in duplication of business edits. I want these rules in one place and centrally controlled. IMHO, I think putting any macro code in the XLS introduces a maintenance issue, even calls to stored procedures (some of which we have) or calls to web services (we haven't yet tried to call .NET Web Services from XLS macros.)
3) Every XLS file upload template has its own process with distinct set of staging and error tables and a custom screen for reporting errors encountered. It seems like we need a more generalized re-usable solution.
Besides often getting data exported to XLS from BO, the users like also Excel because it is easier to edit a large number of records and less clunkier than editing individual records via a web interface.
This is the general direction that I am thinking:
First, I want the users to have the ease of editing of Excel with editing, but without including embedded macros in the spreadsheet. I experimented with Farpoint's Grid with Excel compatibility...
http://www.fpoint.com/netproducts/spreadweb/tour/excel.aspx
...and I found that it was quite easy to allow a user the ability to open up an XLS file that resides on their PC and have it open up in a browser and be able to easily access the data read from server-side .NET web code. Excel isn't running locally in their browser, but the functionality of Excel is reproduced, presumably through a lot of client sided scripting that I expect would be a real pain to duplicate myself. You can even cut and paste from a local spreadsheet into the web's spreadsheet. This sounds great, by biggest problem is cost. Our company is near death and won't allow us to purchase any new software.
Next, I want to identify the common components across all spreadsheet upload processing and come up with generic processing code. For example, I imagine a table which defines each of our spreadsheets and the format of each including the column names and data type definitions, perhaps in terms of their destination columns instead of hard coding. Based on this table template definition, I can generate XLS templates for download from this table definition. I can also perform simple generic edits to ensure that the data entered matches the table definition. And one common web page can be used to present the data and allow report data type mismatch errors and allow for the user to correct them. I would also define a common table for storing the data in a "staging" table, using a table with two columns, submission #, row num, name and value, perhaps. No more "custom everything" is the goal.
Next I need to decide where to put the business rules. My dept's mgt firmly believes that all loading of data should be done by Informatica ETL batch processes and therefore the rules/edits belong "in Informatica". I have zero experience with Informatica tools, I am more of a .NET guy. I am therefore unsure as to how these rules are implemented but I suspect that they are not reusable in the sense that they can be used by a .NET web page to validate a particular record against. You see, in some cases, when the user is not performing a bulk upload, they do have the ability to edit a specific record and I would like the same edits that were applied by the ETL bulk insert process to be applied to an individual update attempt to a single record via a web page. If the solution to write a single web service or stored procedure that can be called from either the web page doing an update of a single record or called thousands of times for each record in a bulk upload? The latter sounds inefficient.
Your thoughts on anything above would be very much welcomed.
From a cost perspective, the efforts you'll need to go through to re-create spreadsheet functionality on the web will exceed the cost of Farpoint or other controls. Even if you made $20 an hour, do you think you could complete a working product in under 2 weeks? I think you have the facts on your side when you discussed maintenance issues if you allow ETL functionality to exist in Excel - you have twice the amount of work to maintain the transformation rules. I think you need to convince management that in order to create a maintainable, robust solution you need some flexible utilities.
Farpoint is a good choice. There is also SpreadsheetGear that is a .Net engine that interprets Excel macros and can run on a web server. It has a Win32 control that allows you to create a WinForms solution with very Excel interface functionality. Last time I checked there was no web control for the product. It does an excellent job of providing Excel capability for processing large amounts of data.
Good luck. I think you will find a good solution since you seem to have a good grasp of the pro's and con's of all the different potential solutions.
I have an web application which serves SQL reporting services reports via the reportviewer control. Because of the complexity of some of the reports I use rdlc reports attached to business objects.
Now I would like to expand the system and allow some form of user-defined reports. Ideally I would like the users to connect their reports to the same business objects I use to create the rdlc reports.
Is there a control that allows users
to create/edit their own rdlc files?
Can rdl files be attached to
business objects?
Any hints/tips for writing my own
control to edit rdlc files? (I would
think this is a lot of work
and would only attempt if there is
no suitable answer to 1 or 2).
All my development has been done in VS 2005 with SQL 2005 but I could upgrade if new features in 2008 help with the solution.
This isn't much of an answer, but at my company I have put together our own Report Builder.
We have about 30 or so Reporting Service reports that our users can access through the web or desktop application. What we wanted to do was give our users the ability to take any given section within those reports and create their own.
If there is a report we have built for them but they don't want to see the graph, they can create the same report with out it. If they want to combine parts from 4 different reports to make one summary report they can drag those sections around on our custom builder and save it.
The report builder I had to put together pulls down all the different sub-reports they have chosen and reads through the XML adding them to a Report Builder Template XML file I have created. I then have to aggregate all the parameters so as to not ask for them more than once (parameter names do have to be unique across all reports if you don't want them aggregated). This new report XML is deployed to the server and the users can access them when ever they want.
I've also given them the ability to create their own cover pages, headers, and footers by dragging text boxes, images, global variables (date ran, created, ran by, page number, etc... anywhere on a blank canvas. I then convert all the items they've drug around and resized on this canvas in to another report XML file and deploy it as a sub-report that they can add to their custom reports.
Yes, this has taken quite a bit of work, but our users love it. We're in the process now of allowing them to create a report with special groupings so the report can be ran at different levels.
So it is possible, but there is no easy answer. =) I'd be glad to give advice to anyone who asks, but a direct copy of the code is a violation of my contract, but I'll do what I can outside of that.
I think SQL Reporting Services isn't meant for this kind of customization. You can hide and show controls and subreports, but stuff like interactive grouping etc isn't there.
You might look into a third-party reporting framework like Telerik's.