Resetting Sitecore Staging Module

Greetings,
A quick troubleshooting post on Friday to wrap up the work week 

This time about our favorite Staging module. This applies to all pre Sitecore 6.3 installations as the latest version does not require this module.

So I have recently witnessed a problem that our customer was facing. The module being stuck during file upload process, giving out a pretty generic error from the Staging log files:

11/2/2010 1:20:29 PM (ER): Could not Execute file upload: Index (zero based) must be greater than or equal to zero and less than the size of the argument list.

It turns out that sometimes the module may not output the most meaningful information to the logs, so the error may not be really helpful here.
For example, this could be caused by missing ACL permissions on the files that the module is synchronizing, etc. By the way, a useful thing to double check – make sure the application pool account has read/write/modify on the folder which are configured to be synchronized.

Here are some quick things you can do fairly to “reset” the module configuration:

1. Delete any files under upload, download and cache sub-folders within the working directory (/sitecore modules/staging/workdir). These are the temp files automatically generated, so it is safe to do this.
2. Clear the value of the “Last updated” field on the appropriate StagingServer item in your master db:

3. Run any type of publishing to trigger the Staging operation again.
4. Monitor Staging logs which are located within the working directory.

Also, check out this useful troubleshooting resource on Staging module troubleshooting.

Posted by Alex Shyba

Source:-http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2010_11_01_archive.html

Previewing Sitecore Reports with Windows Report Designer

Previewing Sitecore Reports with Windows Report Designer

You probably know that you can edit Sitecore OMS reports outside of the browser with Windows based tools from Stimulsoft available for download here.
Our Report Designer Cookbook on SDN documents the following benefits of the Windows based Designer:

• Create new reports from scratch
• Use wizards to quickly create new reports
• Reports load quickly (the client does not run in a browser window)
• Use a number of keyboard shortcuts (including Ctrl Z)
• Preview functionality
• Create complex SQL queries using the Query Builder
• Import and export formatting styles

It turns out that the “Preview” functionality does not, you may be seeing the following errors when trying to preview:

What you need is to copy the following DLLs from your Sitecore bin folder into the bin directory where Report Designer is installed on your workstation (C:\Program Files (x86)\Stimulsoft Reports.Net 2010.2 Trial\Bin):

• Sitecore.Oracle.dll
• Sitecore.Analytics.dll

After you do that, you will be able to preview the reports just fine:

Happy reporting!
Posted by Alex Shyba
Source:- http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2010/11/previewing-sitecore-reports-with.html

Assembly Version Conflicts for Newtonsoft.Json, Telerik, ComponentArt, etc.

Hi there,
Most of you know that Sitecore CMS relies on a few 3rd party components that help providing compelling web experience. A few come to mind: Telerik’s RTE, ComponentArt’s grids, JSON for .NET utility from Newtonsoft, Lucene.NET, etc.
Since earlier Sitecore versions (pre 6.3) rely on older versions of these 3rd party assemblies and most implementers are logically striving for using latest and greatest, conflicts of assembly versions arise. And strangely enough, I am hearing about these issues quite frequently now.
So how can these conflicts can be resolved?
Well, since an option of registering those in GAC is almost always a big NO-NO, the following technique proved to be workable for a few customers. It is called assembly version redirection.
What you need to do is add the following into the web.config’s . The following example covers the “Newtonsoft.Json” assembly, however this is applicable to any other 3rd party assembly:

<dependentAssembly>     

<assemblyIdentity name="Newtonsoft.Json" publicKeyToken="30ad4fe6b2a6aeed" />  

<codeBase version="3.5.0.0" href="C:\wwwroot\Sitecore\WebSite\new_bin\Newtonsoft.Json.dll"/> 

<dependentAssembly>

Afterwards, feel free to reference the newer version in your Visual Studio project, just remember to set the “Copy Local”property to False.
Note that since the release of Sitecore 6.3, most of those 3rd party assemblies were updated, so this article may be completely useless to you. Just make sure to check the exact Sitecore version you are using on the login page!
As always, thanks goes to our tech support for finding such a plausible alternative.
Posted by Alex Shyba
Source:- http://sitecoreblog.alexshyba.com/2010/12/assembly-version-conflicts-for.html