This blogpost is part of short series on ‘XM Cloud – Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) Best Practices‘
- XM Cloud – Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) Best Practices – File System
- XM Cloud – Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) Best Practices – Include naming
- XM Cloud – Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) Best Practices – Module Explorer
First of all Happy New Year! In my previous blogpost I talked about ‘XM Cloud – Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) Best Practices – Include naming’. If you haven’t read that one, please do read it first. With all of that setup I want to quickly talk about how it visually looks like in the ‘Module Explorer’ when we’ve setup multiple modules.
Sitecore CLI or Sitecore for Visual Studio?
For Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) we have 2 options: You can either use the Sitecore CLI, or you can make use of Sitecore for Visual Studio. Since for visuality the only one of them which actually shows a UI is Sitecore for Visual Studio, we’re going to explore it some more. The Sitecore for Visual Studio plugin acts as a graphical user interface for Sitecore Content Serialization.
If you want to use Sitecore Visual Studio with XM Cloud, you need to purchase a license for Sitecore TDS (which isn’t even supported for XM Cloud) and SVS on the Developer Collection website.
To be honest this feels weird, even though SVS is not required for development with XM Cloud. since you can still use the CLI instead, in my opinion this tool should be available for free. It would probably increase the developer experience, since you then will have 2 options which your team can choose from. Hope Sitecore is paying attention and this plugin will be free and become more and more part of the developer experience of developing for XM Cloud. Just my 2 cents!
The SVS plugin provides the following:
- Visual configuration of modules and environments.
- Visual synchronization of items, including conflict handling.
- Visual configuration of automated item synchronization at build time.
Sitecore Module Explorer
So what this post was about is giving you a visual overview of how the SCS modules look like in the Sitecore Module Explorer when it’s structured like we mentioned in the previous blogposts in this series.
When you open up the Sitecore Module Explorer by default you see it like this:
Now if we expand the Modules item we have a great overview of our setup:
As you can see the Helix layers (Foundation, Feature, Project) are nicely structured and for developers it’s obviously where items in Sitecore are synched. Double-clicking on a module opens up a UI configuration of that particular module:
Here you can give the module a nice description, change the order of your includes easily or add tags. One of the nice features is the references section, where can either select names of modules that need to be serialized first or you can even use a wildcard like this ‘Foundation.*’ on Feature module configurations, which basically means that that particular Feature always needs to be preceded by all Foundation modules.
Sitecore Module Explorer documentation
There’s some great documentation on Sitecore for Visual Studio and on the things you can do in the Module Explorer, so make sure to check it out:
And that concludes the 3 part series on ‘XM Cloud – Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) Best Practices’. Your co-developers will thank you later when you followed some of these best practices such as file-system structure, include naming conventions. And if they don’t, then I will when I ever see the solution you set up for XM Cloud 😉
Happy Sitecore-ing and Serializing!
–Robbert
