DEF

While you have a high functional developers team working on multiple Sitecore projects with same code base, it is very vital to keep the local development environment as stable and functional as possible and also keep PR short.

While achieving that stage, we came across one small issue which is intern made me to write a blog in my journal what you are reading now.

The Issue

While reviewing PRs, we observed, there is one Unicorn’s .yml file come as default to quite a few PRs. The change it has got was just few fields updated.

After quick initial investigation, found out that yml file is nothing but one of the Data Exchange Framework(DEF) batch processing item in Sitecore content tree under system node.

After bit more investigation, it turns out the sitecore’s schedule task is triggering that DEF batch process. But that raise another question, why that schduler task item is not coming as changed item list as it is also source controled using Unicorn.

The Resolution

Lets focus on the second question for now, as it has quite a quick and simple answer.

The \App_Config\Include\Unicorn\Unicorn.config has one section called <fieldFilter> which takes care of it. As few frequently value changing fields has already been excluded from being serialized (smart stuff Unicorn Developers).

That section is looking like below

<fieldFilter type="Rainbow.Filtering.ConfigurationFieldFilter, Rainbow" singleInstance="true">
					<exclude fieldID="{B1E16562-F3F9-4DDD-84CA-6E099950ECC0}" note="'Last run' field on Schedule template (used to register tasks)" />
					<exclude fieldID="{52807595-0F8F-4B20-8D2A-CB71D28C6103}" note="'__Owner' field on Standard Template" />
					<exclude fieldID="{8CDC337E-A112-42FB-BBB4-4143751E123F}" note="'__Revision' field on Standard Template" />
					<exclude fieldID="{D9CF14B1-FA16-4BA6-9288-E8A174D4D522}" note="'__Updated' field on Standard Template" />
					<exclude fieldID="{BADD9CF9-53E0-4D0C-BCC0-2D784C282F6A}" note="'__Updated by' field on Standard Template" />
					<exclude fieldID="{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}" note="'__Lock' field on Standard Template" />
				</fieldFilter>

So now, for my initial issue to fix , I simply have to add a field I wanted to exclude form being serializedin to this fieldFilter section.

So, I created new patch configuration file (as best practice suggests) an try to patch my new exclude fields under the node <fieldFilter>. At first, I did add the config like following

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/" xmlns:role="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/role/" xmlns:environment="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/environment/">
	<sitecore role:require="Standalone or ContentManagement">
		<unicorn>
			<defaults>
				<!--
					The field filter can be used to ignore fields when comparing or serializing (i.e. don't write them to disk).
					Commonly, metadata fields such as Last Updated will be ignored to prevent SCM conflicts.
				-->
				<fieldFilter>
					<exclude patch:after="exclude[@fieldID='{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}']" fieldID="{985BA535-0F3E-4DA8-A768-A469026DE9DB}" note="'RequestedAt' field of DEF's Pipeline Batch item" />
					<exclude patch:after="exclude[@fieldID='{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}']" fieldID="{6A2B2CBB-4338-4814-A8A9-9FECBB90456A}" note="'LastRunFinished' field of DEF's Pipeline Batch item" />
					<exclude patch:after="exclude[@fieldID='{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}']" fieldID="{2AA5C591-FF55-411D-96C0-978BB2C58B94}" note="'Log' field of DEF's Pipeline Batch item" />
				</fieldFilter>
			</defaults>
		</unicorn>
	</sitecore>
</configuration>

But this has weird patching when I see showconfig.appx. It actually replaces first three entries form the original xml…!!!???

I did ask God(google) and found that sitecore sometime does not patch correctly if proper attributes are not used. Someone suggest to use hint attribute to control the patching.

I did replace my patching config attribute note with the hint and eureka….!!!

This is the final configuration patch file looks like.

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/" xmlns:role="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/role/" xmlns:environment="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/environment/">
	<sitecore role:require="Standalone or ContentManagement">
		<unicorn>
			<defaults>
				<!--
					The field filter can be used to ignore fields when comparing or serializing (i.e. don't write them to disk).
					Commonly, metadata fields such as Last Updated will be ignored to prevent SCM conflicts.
				-->
				<fieldFilter>
					<exclude patch:after="exclude[@fieldID='{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}']" fieldID="{985BA535-0F3E-4DA8-A768-A469026DE9DB}" hint="'RequestedAt' field of DEF's Pipeline Batch item" />
					<exclude patch:after="exclude[@fieldID='{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}']" fieldID="{6A2B2CBB-4338-4814-A8A9-9FECBB90456A}" hint="'LastRunFinished' field of DEF's Pipeline Batch item" />
					<exclude patch:after="exclude[@fieldID='{001DD393-96C5-490B-924A-B0F25CD9EFD8}']" fieldID="{2AA5C591-FF55-411D-96C0-978BB2C58B94}" hint="'Log' field of DEF's Pipeline Batch item" />
				</fieldFilter>
			</defaults>
		</unicorn>
	</sitecore>
</configuration>

After this, Unicorn re-serialized the DEF pipeline batch items and happy days….!!!!

Note:
There is new feature “fieldTransforms” available in Unicorn 4.1 and later version but I have not able to get that working on my project setup. But, something worth exploring for next time.