Category: Sitecore xDB

Performance tuning of Sitecore SPEAK components

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to explain you how you can reduce the time taken for loading by SPEAK components in your Sitecore application.

In order to reduce load time of SPEAK components after website modification, you can alter the compilation element in the web.config by adding the optimizeCompilations attribute to it as follows:

<compilation ...  optimizeCompilations="true">

Actual Implementation in web.config file looks like:

c

Adding this attribute will make ASP.NET re-compile only the files that were explicitly changed and leave all the other files intact.

Please note that if optimizeCompilations is true, you might encounter some issues during development after re-compilation. According to the MSDN article

When you change a top-level file only the affected files are recompiled. This saves time but can cause run-time errors depending on the type of changes you make to a top-level file.

Please check the Optimizing Dynamic Compilation part of the a aforementioned article for more details.

Happy Learning Sitecore !!!!

Advertisement

Sitecore Module for Stepping in IoT

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

Today I am going to share my innovative primary module to connect to robotic kits like “Arduino, Raspberry pi, Atmega”. But I have tested this with Arduino as it has wider community. There are different ways to get IoT resolved most recommended in Microsoft era is Azure IoT Hub. But there is one more leader which is AWS IoT Core. And using AWS IoT Core there is great offering from Arduino which is Arduino’s AWS hosted IoT IDE where you can find predefined projects and modules. You can create your own project for your circuit. 

You can find the module on below link—-

https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/S/Sitecore_IoT_ModuleArduino.aspx

This module will be showing you how to create a Sitecore web application capable of communicating with Arduino. Excited yet? No? Well, you should be.

All you need for this Module, an Arduino board (my particular model is the Uno Rev3, but I’m sure most models will work just fine), and some basic wire and LED components. I picked up an ARDX Starter Kit, which contained all the LEDs and wires I needed. 

This once you install this module you will get two pages for controlling Arduino as below.

1.     http://your-domain/Iot/IoT%20Controlling

2.     http:// your-domain /IoT/IoT%20monitoring

If you on the first page you will get below the control panel, where you will get the basic functionality of triggering LED.

No alt text provided for this image

You can change the functionality for triggering different commands.

Now the second part of this module is the Monitoring panel, where you can monitor different inputs given by Arduino to Sitecore application. You can also configure this page with personalization and capturing data into xDB and get different reports.

Below are some photos for my circuit connections which are useful for you to connect.

No alt text provided for this image

Using my breadboard, I configured the hardware portion of my project like so (excuse the terrible art):

No alt text provided for this image

Below are the connections for the monitoring circuit.

No alt text provided for this image

Purpose of this Module:

The purpose of creating this module is to make the Sitecore community aware that IoT is next which we need to spread. This module gives us to communicate with IoT devices. Another emerging thing about stepping into this is IoT devices are widely used in different things Like Agriculture, Intelligence, Security, Armed Forces. I want to get Sitecore involved in the above field.

In future:

My plan in future is to work with my own case study of Wireless Agriculture Monitoring and Solution system which we already implemented to KIAAR which is research institute in India. This case study was limited to only institute now I want to make sure that the model is working on wider scale and Sitecore is platform, where I can collect every data, manipulate it and get monitoring reports as well as create the real-time solution for that situation and send it back to Farmers in the form of SMS, Email or other media in their own languages.

Please check blog Sitecore IoT Part-2 for getting insights of how to run Arduino code.

Happy for sharing this, stay tuned for great and innovative stuff. Please do comment and share