Skip to main content

Anatomy of Sitecore Business Rule - Field Syntax

In the previous post, I talked about the general anatomy of Sitecore Business Rules. In this post, we will dig more into the rule itself and how you can set one up.

In the previous post, I mentioned the "special syntax" a rule has in the "text" field. Let's dig more into what this is. This is broken into 4 parameters, not all of which are required. 

  • Property to set, defines the public property of the class where we want to assign the value coming from the content author input
  • Operator or Macro, the operator we want to use to evaluate the condition. In this case, this will be a string comparison operation
  • Additional Parameters, this parameter will depend on the type of macro that we use, this could be a default text value if we are using the default macro,  it could be a default start path if we’re using the Tree macro (root=/sitecore/content/myitem)  – think of it like setting a field source when we’re building a template in Sitecore. A full list of macros can be found in /Sitecore/system/Settings/Rules/Definitions/Macros. This field is seen by Macros and Operators as a URL so it is a name-value list that must have special characters encoded. Example: validation=%5E%5Cd%2B(%5C.%5Cd%2B)%3F%24&validationText=Please enter a valid decimal value&maxLength=2
  • Display text, the last parameter is the text representation that we want to show to the content author, this value is clickable and when clicked Sitecore will display the appropriate input control based on the macro that we set on the second parameter

In the example of the query string condition, the only things that are required are "Property to set", in this case, they are setting a property called "value". Then they are setting the display text to value.



The first word of a condition text can always be changed to be positive "where" or a negative condition "except where". You can remove the word "where" and it will become "the query string.." or "except the query string", so this positive or negative toggling capability is added automatically.

Now let's break down the code and the "special" syntax.


Here we can see how this all comes together. In the top left, we have the syntax of the rule. In the middle is how that syntax is displayed to the author. On the top right is what the author configures the rule as. Below those is the code that is executed. Here you can see that the first parameter (the property to set) calls out the public "Value" property on the class. This is the field that the last parameter (value) should be assigned to. So in this case "My Test" will be assigned to the property "Value". Now when the rule executes it has access to the value the content author set and executes logic against that value. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Experience Profile Anonymous, Unknown and Known contacts

When you first get started with Sitecore's experience profile the reporting for contacts can cause a little confusion. There are 3 terms that are thrown around, 1) Anonymous 2) Unknown 3) Known. When you read the docs they can bleed into each other a little. First, have a read through the Sitecore tracking documentation to get a feel for what Sitecore is trying to do. There are a couple key things here to first understand: Unless you call " IdentifyAs() " for request the contact is always anonymous.  Tracking of anonymous contacts is off by default.  Even if you call "IdentifyAs()" if you don't set facet values for the contact (like first name and email) the contact will still show up in your experience profile as "unknown" (because it has no facet data to display).  Enabled Anonymous contacts Notice in the picture I have two contacts marked in a red box. Those are my "known" contacts that I called "IdentifyAs"

Excel XIRR and C#

I have spend that last couple days trying to figure out how to run and Excel XIRR function in a C# application. This process has been more painful that I thought it would have been when started. To save others (or myself the pain in the future if I have to do it again) I thought I would right a post about this (as post about XIRR in C# have been hard to come by). Lets start with the easy part first. In order to make this call you need to use the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel dll. When you use this dll take note of what version of the dll you are using. If you are using a version less then 12 (at the time of this writing 12 was the highest version) you will not have an XIRR function call. This does not mean you cannot still do XIRR though. As of version 12 (a.k.a Office 2007) the XIRR function is a built in function to Excel. Prior version need an add-in to use this function. Even if you have version 12 of the interop though it does not mean you will be able to use the function. The

Uniting Testing Expression Predicate with Moq

I recently was setting up a repository in a project with an interface on all repositories that took a predicate. As part of this I needed to mock out this call so I could unit test my code. The vast majority of samples out there for mocking an expression predicate just is It.IsAny<> which is not very helpful as it does not test anything other then verify it got a predicate. What if you actually want to test that you got a certain predicate though? It is actually pretty easy to do but not very straight forward. Here is what you do for the It.IsAny<> approach in case someone is looking for that. this .bindingRepository.Setup(c => c.Get(It.IsAny<Expression<Func<UserBinding, bool >>>())) .Returns( new List<UserBinding>() { defaultBinding }.AsQueryable()); This example just says to always return a collection of UserBindings that contain “defaultBinding” (which is an object I setup previously). Here is what it looks like when you want to pass in an exp

Security Config in IIS Express

I have gotten tired of always having to look this up or remember where it is at. That means it is time to post to my blog so I can find it easier and hopefully others can too. If you are having issues with IIS Express authentication errors (like the Unauthorized 401.2 error I always get) here is some help. I can never remember what the last setting was I had IIS Express set to for authorization. To change IIS Express for windows auth or anonymous auth you want to work with the applicationhost.config file. It can be found here …Documents\IISExpress\config. You want to change the settings in the following area of the config file. < authentication > < anonymousAuthentication enabled ="true" userName ="" /> < basicAuthentication enabled ="false" /> < clientCertificateMappingAuthentication enabled ="false" /> < digestAuthentication enabled ="false" />

WPF Localization - RESX Option

About a year ago I was building a WPF project in .Net 3.0 and Visual Studio 2005. I wanted to revisit this subject and see what has changed in .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. I will make a few of these posts to try and cover all the different options (RESX option, LocBaml option, Resource Dictionary Option). In this blog I will focus on using a resx file to localize an application. To show how the resx option is done I created a WPF form with three labels on it. The first label has is text set inline in XAML, the second has it text set via code behind from the resx file and the third has its text set via XAML accessing the resx file. The first thing that needs to happen to setup a project for localization is a small change to the project file. To make this change you will need to open the project file in notepad (or some other generic editor). In the first PropertyGroup section you need to add the follow XML node <UICulture>en-US</UICulture>. So the project file node w