Tech Blog Menu

Some parts of Coveo’s query pipeline are extensible using JavaScript. We initially used DynJS, but since it’s now unmaintained, we had to switch to a new JS engine, namely Nashorn that comes out-of-the-box starting with Java 8. Nashorn works pretty well, but it’s missing built-in support for the require function that is used with CommonJS modules.

Writing an API client in JavaScript is a lot of work, you have to write one for Node.js and one for the browser. I found out a way to have both on the same codebase with the same API, all that with only changes to the build scripts. It’s called isomorphic code, and doing it with modern TypeScript isn’t easy, but it’s achievable.

For website search, relevancy of the search results should be a priority. When indexing a Sitecore item with Coveo for Sitecore, you want as much information as possible to be indexed. That’s why you probably use the HtmlContentInBodyWithRequestsProcessor to index the Sitecore rendered HTML of the item. However, you don’t want to index global sections of the HTML like the header, footer, navigation, ads and sidebars. A few solutions were available to do so. This post details a simple solution that involves only a Sitecore processor and minor edits to layouts, sublayouts or views.

Update 2016/12/10: It’s now on Maven central! I’ve added some precisions below but I have left the post mostly intact for historical purposes. Update 2016/07/08: The project is now available on GitHub! I plan on making it more generic before publishing it to Maven, I’ll update this post soon with the new details. Exception handling across microservices can be tedious, let’s see how the Java reflection API can help us ease the pain!

In July 2015, Microsoft announced the release of Typescript 1.5, introducing decorators, based on the ES7 decorator proposal. I had to test it!

In the Usage Analytics service, there is a layer that validates if a user is allowed to perform the requested action. This should not be a surprise for anybody as all applications have some kind of security or permission check somewhere. Since the UA service is built in a layer architecture, that’s the job of the permission layer. The code is pretty boilerplate and very similar for all the different calls. It follows this logic : Extract user identity and account from token Check if the user has the required permissions If he does, call the service layer If he doesn’t, throw an exception

This year was the sixth edition of Coveo Blitz, our classic programming contest for students. The original purpose of the event is to find great, passionate developers and show them how fun, passionate, and driven our team is. We had the idea to step out of our comfort zone this year and focus on what we’ve learned in the last editions.

When developing dialogs, wizards and applications in Sitecore, a developer would have to open them many times per day. When the action to open them requires more than one click, a lot of time will be lost. Wouldn’t it be nice if one could open a dialog from the browser console command line or a bookmark?

In the last months, we experienced with React and we enjoyed it a lot. As you may know, all Coveo’s web applications are built using TypeScript, so with the release of TypeScript 1.6 announcing support for React JSX syntax, we were stoked!

The new Coveo JS UI has been available for a while now. How about getting off to the right start? Well you’re at the right place, here is a tutorial on how to configure and use the new Coveo JS UI.