We are building a Sitecore site that will pull in some product data from an external database. On a nightly basis we will query the external database and either Add, Update or Archive/Delete/Remove product content items in Sitecore as needed. Our data template has some fields that will be populated directly from the external database (and will be read-only for content authors) and other fields that they will populate themselves. Included in our custom fields will be the SKU of the item from the external database. It is possible that over time a product could disappear from the external database. In this case we would want Sitecore to somehow remove this item from our list of products, but not completely delete it. The reason for this is that the products that have been removed could reappear in the future and we would not want to lose all of the data that had been added to other custom fields on the item. I can think of a number of different approaches for this:
Use Archiving/Recycling features of Sitecore. When we find that there is a product item in Sitecore that no longer appears in the external database, then we could archive it. That works well. However I can't seem to figure out a way to restore that item later if it reappears in the external database. I don't have any access to any custom fields when an item is archived (from what I have read online). So when I come across a SKU in the external database that is not in Sitecore, I have no way of figuring out if there is an archived item that has that SKU.
Use a custom status field on each product content item. I could set each product content item to "active" or "inactive". This would make it easy to reactivate items that reappear in the external database. However I worry about things like search and publishing. It seems messy to me to have some content items that are inactive in the folder of all products in the master database. It could be confusing to content authors and I worry that they will find their way in to the web database, etc. It seems like I would have to do a lot of custom coding to make sure that those products do not show up on any pages, etc.
When a product disppears from the external database I could then move those content items to a different location in Sitecore. Then when they reappear I could move them back. This also feels messy.
I just wonder if there is some better solution that I am missing. Thanks in advance for any help.
I would go with option 2 "Setting status field on each product "Active" or "Inactive", as its more clear and keep the data in one place.
Additional thing to do (as suggested by Vasiliy) is to set the "Publishable" checkbox on product to "False", this way the product will disappear from web database, hence no extra filter in your search methods.
You can implement custom content editor warning to inform content editor that the current product is "inactive":
Creating Custom Content Editor warnings
Hope this helps
Just a thought what if you just unpublished the items that were removed from the external database and set the ones in the authoring db unpublishable until they reappear again. With this scenario, you could also have a task running archiving items that have been unpublished and not republished for a given period of time.
The best solution really depends on the number and frequency of items appearing / disappearing and the cost benefit of keeping those items in the authoring database vs. deleting them.
Related
I am using django-oscar == 1.6.1 for a project.
I am trying to add recommended products to an individual product in the dashboard, currently I see that the recommended product field is empty, how do I populate it and give the ranking?
It's a streaming search field, whatever you type should search for related term in your existing products database.
For example, if you type <search_term> it would ultimately query (after several intermediate queries of substrings) & hit http://localhost:8000/dashboard/catalogue/product-lookup/?q=<search_term>, the view for which can be found here. As you can see, it searches the product titles only, if you need something else, you can always modify it.
By the looks of it, you haven't populated your products database yet, or there's something else wrong with your installation or setup.
I have an Apex application that is quite large. The need has come up to store detailed usage logs of this application. The information on APEX_WORKSPACE_ACTIVITY_LOG is not enough, because I need to know what queries each user runs on each page.
My first thought was to get the actual Oracle query logs (V$SQL and such), but they provide no information on the user (as far as the database is concerned, all queries are made by APEX_PUBLIC_USER). I have some information about the user on V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY, but that's incomplete because it stores samples of active sessions and their SQL queries at 1-second intervals, so I miss too many queries.
So now I'm off to implementing application level logging. The "right" way to fo this would be to go through all the pages in my application and create a logging process to store the relevant information for each one (username and some page items). But I wonder if there might be something simpler that does the trick.
If I understand correcly, "application processes" are run by every page in the application. So if I can get an application process to iterate over the list of page items, I can store them all in the database and be done with it. Something like
for item in page_items {
log(username, item_name, item, date)
}
Can this be done? Or maybe the information I need is on the database already and I don't see it?
You can query the metadata tables to get all items for a specific page and then use that to get their value.
select item_name, v(item_name) item_value
from apex_application_page_items
where application_id = :APP_ID
and page_id = :APP_PAGE_ID;
That will capture all items on the page. Don't forget that if you use items on Page 0 (Global Page) you may want to query that page too.
Additionally, you may want to capture application level items too.
select item_name, v(item_name) item_value
from apex_application_items
where application_id = :APP_ID;
I have a project that looks like a simple shopping site that sells different kinds of products. For example, I have 4 models: Brand, Product, Consignment. Consignment is linked to Product, and Product is linked to Brand. To reduce count of queries to databases, I want to save current state of these models(or at least some of them). I want to do it, because I show a sidebar with brands and products. So every time when user opens some page, it will execute the query to database to get those brands and products.
But when admin add some new product or brand, I want to handle database changing and resave it. How to implement it?
Your answer is by using Cache. Cache is a method to store your objects in memory/other app like redis temporarily so that you do not need send queries to database. You can read the full description here.
Or, you can use this third party library that helps you to cache Django ORM Model. Here are the example.
Brand.objects.filter(name='stackoverlow').cache()
After doing an update to the model, you need to clear or invalidate the cache.
invalidate_model(Brand)
How do bind a DropLink using a custom dataprovider?
More info:
I am trying to build a product catalogue site using Sitecore. Each product in the sitecore content tree can have a star rating and short text review attached to it (which will be linked to a user extended with a profile provider but that is another question).
I am planning to store the review information in an external database and reference it using a custom dataprovider. I have downloaded the NorthwindDataProvider from the Shared Source (here) and have altered it to use a table which contains the rating, text and a uniqueidentifier field to store the ID of the product from in sitecore the review is attached to.
The template field is a droplink and the datasource is set to the products in the catalogue.
When I edit a review in the custom dataprovider using the sitecore content editor, the droplink states 'Value not in selection list' even if I select one of the populated products and save using sitecore.
It is saving the ID in the database but if I look at the raw value it displays the id without the curly brackets. Working droplink fields' raw values appear to contain the brackets.
To create a review, I am using a jquery post to a webservice which writes to the database using an external datacontext. Should I be using some Sitecore API to use the custom dataprovider instead?
Any information using custom dataproviders would be helpful. The documentation I've been able to find has all stated what can be done but I'm struggling to find actual implementation.
So the first thing is that you have a template field and you're using droplink which is going to store the guid for the item selected. I'm not quite clear on whether or not you're pointing the datasource to a Sitecore item or not.. but that's essential if you're using droplink. Here's what I would suggest instead for the most straight forward way to do this:
Create a template that you add fields to handle the logic dealing with your catalog items. How you do that is your choice and Sitecore doesn't care since its only going to deal with the item and all it cares about is finding an item... you write business logic to manipulate the external data.
Once you have a folder that stores your catalog items, you could easily write a script to be triggered by the Rules engine in Sitecore or a Sitecore task that runs regularly to get your catalog items to add/update or remove the corresponding list of Sitecore items.
Also, another option that is more complex to implement, but if you have multiple data sources on your site, is a valid approach, is to use an object framework (like the Entity framework) as a data object layer that allows you to create and populate common objects with from any data source.
Hope this is helpful!
I am working on a project that needs to be able to create dynamic queries into an H2 database. This also includes a full text search with built-in H2 logic, tables, and triggers.
I have been trying to figure out how to add that full-text search into my CriteriaQuery but keep running into the road block that the tables used aren't entities in my model. I could add them as entities, but I don't want them created automatically by EclipseLink when a new database file is created since there is a function in H2 that creates the tables and does other necessary housekeeping.
I had tried the path of creating a view to query the full text tables to give me the information I need in the format I need. But I still keep running into the same problem that that view is not an Entity.
Has anyone encountered this situation before and/or figured out a way around it?
Thanks!