Lessons learned from a “boring” Black Friday

This Black Friday, I was in a task force, ready to help high profile DXC Commerce customers to cope with a peak in traffic. It turned out to be boring – there was no moment I could be a hero and “save the day”. Things went surprisingly smooth, even for websites which were struggling with last Black Friday. I went home and was little dissatisfied, but deep down, I know it was a huge success. The hard work from us (Commerce development team), them (the partner development teams), and Managed Services has been well paid off.

Use the latest version

You have heard me saying this, and you will probably hear from me again: Please, use the latest version possible. There is no reason to stay with an old version. This is a little truth: I hurt a little deep inside whenever I read a question on world asking a question about Commerce 7.5, or even 8.x. You should be using at least 10.8 by now, if not 11.x.

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Please, rebuild your database indexes, now

I will make it quick and to the point: if you are expecting a lot of customers visiting your site tomorrow (and you should) for Black Friday, you should rebuild your database indexes, now.

On average, it will help you to serve more customers and they will be happier with a more responsive, faster website. On best cases it will help prevent catastrophes.

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Read only Catalog UI – part 1

https://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/Episerver-Commerce/Thread-Container/2015/6/read-only-catalog/

A while back, we had this question on World. It’s not uncommon to update the catalog data by an external system, mostly from a PIM – Product information management system. In such cases, it might not make senses to enable editing in Catalog UI. You might need the new UI for the other parts, such as Marketing UI, but you wouldn’t want the editors to accidentally update the product information – because those would be lost, anyway.

Is there away to do it? Yes, there is.

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Beware of IContentLoader.GetChildren() for CatalogContent

This is more of a self-to-note.

If you are using IContentLoader.GetChildren<T>(ContentReference), one important thing to remember is this uses the current preferred language. Normally when you get children of a catalog, or a node, that would not be a problem, because a catalog entity – node or entry, will be available in every language supported by the catalog. So if you just want to get the children references, the language is not important. (Note that, if you just need the children references, IRelationRepository should be a faster, more lightweight way to go, but that’s another story). If you want to get children in a specific language – which is the most common case, you know that you can use the other overload of GetChildren<T>(ContentReference, ILanguageSelector) , where you can specify the language you want to load.

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