My last post was a kick off a series of things to watch out for and pay attention to while implementing Coveo For Sitecore on a Multi-tenant/Multi-Site Sitecore instance. This is a runner-up for my last post and part of same series. Let me start this by saying, URL on search result is single most important entry point for your user to see detailed content around what they think is relevant. To ensure this is rendered right every single time, It is very critical that you know your Sitecore Link provider or Custom Link provider if any in and out on your Coveo For Sitecore installation.
There are few things that you will need to know in order to fine tune anything or in order to debug issues if any when you see things you do not wish to see in relation to Url’s either on Indexes or on your search page. If you are lucky and do not have much of customization going in your Sitecore link provider, you should be fine doing nothing as Coveo fires off link provider at it’s two most important phases OOTB.
- Index Sync Process
- Displaying paged results on Coveo driven search page
Now, the most important thing to remember is that while Coveo does #1 noted above it calls Sitecore Link Provider in “shell” context while doing it’s best to load up UrlOptions object that is passed in as a parameter to Sitecore GetItemURL method of Link Provider with appropriate site details it could resolve the currently indexed item with. Coveo has their algorithm that runs as part of ResolveItemSiteProcessor located in coveoResolveItemSite pipeline. Below is the snippet of that processor located on Coveo.SearchProvider.Config
<coveoResolveItemSite> <processor type="Coveo.SearchProvider.Processors.ResolveItemSiteProcessor, Coveo.SearchProviderBase" /> </coveoResolveItemSite>
If this processor is not working wonders for you, go ahead and remove this in your favorite custom coveo configuration file and add your own. For curious brains, I recommend changing your level of logging to DEBUG to understand what happens step by step while Coveo tries syncing your Index. That was very insightful in understanding sequence of calls and pipelines that fire while Coveo is indexing or doing sync process. But, do remember change that back to INFO after your appetite is satisfied. 😉
Now, for the last clue, on #2 stated above when your Coveo Search Page renders your search results for a query, it calls Sitecore link provider again to get the click uri for each search result that goes with each search result. Now, pay attention here, very important to know that the context site this call runs in is “coveorest”. If your link provider is super awesome and written very well thought out, you will have no problems regardless on the context site the call is running in. But, if your link provider is using context.site instead of using site info from UrlOptions or doing some thing really out of this world, you have to know these things to ensure you hit the gold.
Hopefully these tidbits will help you debug any issues while Coveo constructs the URL’s at indexing or run time. If you have lot of shared content that does not reside under a specific site node, then, it is very hard to get the URL right at indexing time which is why it is even more important to focus on #2 to ensure the end user experience is seamless and correct leading them to correct site, language and context.
There, I gave away a hint, next up, I will be covering language related insights like fall back and localization in my next post. That is all for now, tune in soon for more. 🙂