Redirect Sitecore Azure App service website from HTTP to HTTPS

One of my client Sitecore website https://www.example.com is running on Azure App service. As its running on HTTPS,so whenever users try to access website using HTTP protocol, then they get the error. So requirement is that how to redirect from http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com?

Solution:-

• Login to Azure Portal
  
• Open your Sitecore Azure App Service. Its name should be "mysitecoredev93-111111-single" or similar to this.
  
• Under Custom Domain, turn ON "HTTPS Only" mode.

Once it is done, now your http://www.example.com should redirect to https://www.example.com.

I hope this quick tip help you in Sitecore Azure App service deployment.

Problem with Sitecore GraphQL on Azure

We have deployed JSS App on Sitecore instance running on Azure.

For one of the component we are using GraphQL which is perfectly working on local machine.

But when we deploy it on Azure our GraphQL query was not returning anything.

Our query was

var query = `{

search(fieldsEqual: [{name: "_fullpath",

value: "/sitecore/content/myjssproj/Content/BlogsCollection/ContentListField/*"}

])

As you can note, we have used "fieldsEqual" parameter and pass the name and value. You will get this query result on your local machine but this is not going to work on Azure.

I think this is because we are using "Azure Search" and Azure have limitation of 1000 fields index. It may be possible that Azure search not indexed system fields.

So if you want to use Azure Search with GraphQL you should rewrite your query with "rootItem" parameter as

var query = `{

search(rootItem: "/sitecore/content/myjssproj/Content/BlogsCollection/ContentListField/*"

)

Other alternative is to use SOLR as a search on Azure. I find this link is very simple and handy to install SOLR on azure.

Fix : Sitecore error - The type initializer for 'System.Drawing.ToolboxBitmapAttribute' threw an exception.

Our Sitecore website was running fine on Azure. But one day when we tried to open Content Editor, we started to receive error "The type initializer for 'System.Drawing.ToolboxBitmapAttribute' threw an exception."

As we have to update the content urgently and our Content editor was unable to update any content, so for the time being we updated those content from "DB browser" screen by accessing https://mysc.azurewebsites.net/sitecore/admin/dbbrowser.aspx.

However this was temporary solution, we have to resolve this issue anyway.

Solution:- 
Somewhere on web I read that the cause of this type of error is temp files on server.

As our instance was running on Azure, so we updated web.config file by editing some comment in the hope that it will recycle the app pool but this trick did not worked.

Next thing we tried to "Restart" the web app and once app was up, our content editor able to access content editor and updated content successfully.

I think App service restart operation removed those temp files and fixed the issue.

Webinar on Voice based search with Sitecore GraphQL

I conducted webinar on "Voice based search with Sitecore GraphQL" for SUGNCR group today.

Sample code for this demo is available at  https://github.com/alexksharma/VOICE-BASED-SEARCH-WITH-SITECORE-GRAPHQL

 Watch recording for more details

Sitecore Smart Comment Analyzer using Microsoft Azure Text Analytics Service

Happy to share that I have created new Sitecore module "Smart Comment Analyzer using Microsoft Azure Text Analytics Service".

One can use this module on Product page or blog website pages to collect comments from visitors. These comments will be analyze for their sentiment score as positive or negative. All positive comments directly published on the website page while all the negative and abusive comments will be stored in external SQL database which further reviewed by Sitecore backend team for publish approval. 

Watch the video for more details. 

Image tagging in Sitecore using Microsoft Computer Vision

Happy to share that I have created a module to add tags automatically to new or existing media library image item in Sitecore using Microsoft Computer Vision.

Watch the video for more details. 

Course : Getting started with Azure Tools

Today I successfully completed one more course certification "Getting started with Azure Tools" from Udemy. Its a 6.5 hours of free course delivered by Payal Shah.

Getting started with Azure Tools

In this course I learned

• Introduction
• Azure Functions
• Azure Logic Apps
• Azure Cosmos DB
• Azure Event Grid
• Azure IoT Hub
• Azure DevTest Labs
• Azure Key Vault
• Azure Storage Account

I encourage everybody to attend this useful course on AZURE.

Certification : Manage Azure Cloud With ARM Templates

Exploring Azure. Completed one more certification in "Azure Crash Course: Manage Azure Cloud With ARM Templates" from Udemy.