July 2019 – released Sitecore Experience Accelerator 1.9.0
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA) enables parallel work streams (content, creative design, UX, coding) that not only reduce the time required to produce a website, but also improve quality by allowing contributors to validate each other's contributions. SXA provides reusable user experience layouts and components that are fully integrated into the Sitecore editing experience.
Highlights
Sitecore Experience accelerator 1.9 includes:
- You can now add background images to any component.
- You can now define a rule in the
Sitecore Rules Enginethat assigns a page design to a page when it is rendered. - StyleLabs is now integrated with SXA Responsive images and allows you to use StyleLabs transformations to render the most appropriate images for different screen sizes.
- SXA is now integrated with JSS.
- A Component Wizard has been added to facilitate the creation of custom components assembled from SXA features.
New feature/improvements
| Description | Customer ticket ID (or other) | TFS no. |
|---|---|---|
| A new pipeline have been introduced to extend the rendering of search results with injected models. | 312358 | |
When you create a Tenant and a Site, a matching folder structure is created under the Forms root item. | 512325 | 242100 |
The SXA Razor Views are now precompiled to improve server warm-up time. | 521442 | 247369 |
| SXA check boxes are no longer shown in the Experience Editor if you are editíng a non-SXA site page. | 247710 | |
You can now add background images to any component by adding the Background Image data template to your datasource template inheritance list. | 247727 | |
You can now configure Rendering variants so that they are available in Partial Designs and Composites. | 247754 | |
The SXA Site Manager now contains a button for refreshing the site list. | 247785 | |
You can now define a rule in the Sitecore Rules Engine that assigns a page design to a page when it is rendered. | 311081 | |
| StyleLabs is now integrated with SXA Responsive images and allows you to use StyleLabs transformations to render the most appropriate images for different screen sizes. | 300489 | |
| In Experience Editor, the SXA component toolbox now allows you to filter the component list by some text. | 289028 | |
| If a media item is not found or if an item layout is not defined, you can now show a custom error page. | 286695 | |
The Pagination component now uses 1 based indexing rather than 0 based indexing and this gives more user-friendly URLs. | 517256, 518345, 524256, 530520 | 257567 |
You can now use the Sitemap Index and the Structure Sitemap simultaneously on a single site. | 516115 | 257372 |
The Image component no longer renders a link around an image if the link was not specified in the data source. | 516127 | 255497 |
| SXA is now integrated with JSS and you can create tenants and sites that can be consumed by JSS. | 252753 | |
ECMAScript 6 support has been introduced by adding a Sources folder to a theme. It can be down-compiled to ECMAScript 5 with the tools that are provided. | 250859 | |
| Canonical URL meta rendering has been added that allows you to add canonical URLs for pages that can appear on multiple sites. | 250729 | |
A Component Wizard has been added to facilitate the creation of custom components assembled from SXA features. | 247849 |
Resolved issues
The following issues have been fixed:
| Description | Customer ticket ID (or other) | TFS no. |
|---|---|---|
In the robots.txt file, Allow and Disallow entries are not updated correctly based on user input. | 517065, 517907 | 257288 |
The Link List renders an empty tag when the Title field is empty. | CS0158095, CS0168099, CS0164922 | 328501, 349511 |
The Illegal recursion detected: GetModel message may appear after a server is restarted. | 519978, 512321, 521645, 523168, 526210, 526213, 529755 | 247244 |
If the Enable Preview setting disabled on a website, the website does not appear on a content delivery server. | 518435 | 287750 |
In the Wireframe theme on Bootstrap 4, if you place rich text in a nested placeholder, it is aligned incorrectly. | 290172 | |
If the Asset Optimizer is disabled and the current theme contains over 100 CSS files, only some of the theme CSS file links are rendered on a page. | 291496 | |
SXA does not respect the RequestErrors.UseServerSideRedirect setting in the Sitecore.config file. | 518917 | 292799 |
In a paused YouTube video, if you click the Share icon, the video resumes playback. | 520375 | 296541 |
The Publishing Service does not publish in SXA. | 517665, 519554, 524074, 524313 | 286762 |
Data sources that are set in the Final Renderings field of composite sections are rendered incorrectly. | 515779 | 296704 |
| An invalid email address causes content to be displayed rather than the validation message. | 520025, 527928 | 296726 |
| Sitecore forms cannot be embedded in SXA overlays. | 520188, 525335 | 296772 |
If the Maps theme is not added to the inheritance structure of the site theme, a JavaScript error is displayed for the SXA search components. | 520151 | 297240 |
If you add local promo renderings to the main placeholder, the Field control has failed to render: Guid should contain 32 digits... exception is displayed. | 520474, 521822 | 297944 |
| If the search phrase contains an ampersand character, the search box does not work. | 521209 | 299324 |
Creative Exchange exports HTML with optimized rather than expanded CSS and JS. | 522375, 522410, 522511, 523269, 528468 | 301730 |
SXA data source tokens don't work with the Component variant renderer. | 522622 | 302117 |
The SXA taxonomy TagTokenBase.BuildModel() method uses the tag name instead of the configured field value. | 522846 | 303709 |
| SXA search results use the default link provider rather than the SXA link provider. | 522596 | 304251 |
SxaItemCrawler does not remove deleted documents from the sitecore_sxa_web_index during publishing operations. | 521125, 522988, 523114, 527263, 528197, 529819 | 304700 |
If Show predictions is selected in the Search Box properties, a NullReferenceException is thrown. | 525769 | 305143 |
When you use Azure Search, the Facet service fails if there are more than 50 items in the result. | 522975, 528274 | 305246 |
The name of the XA.Foundation.Search.SolrCloud.SwitchOnRebuild configuration file does not match the content of the file. | 523360 | 305546 |
The SXA Creative Exchange Protected Theme checkbox may not work if folder names at the same level are substrings of each other. | 522923 | 305902 |
The Responsive image variant component creates invalid HTML markup that contains an additional </img> tag. | 523342 | 306103 |
| Users are unable to edit multiple snippets on a page. | 523372 | 306223 |
| The Carousel shows an error if you change the rendering variant of the embedded Page Content rendering. | 532519 | 306382 |
The $sharedSites token does not show the correct root location for the DropTree field. | 523445 | 306406 |
| If two composites of the same type are placed on a page, changing the data source in the composite rendering causes the embedded renderings to disappear. | 524802 | 309589 |
If an SXAContent computed index field contains aggregated page content, it creates an unnecessary performance overhead. | 309722 | |
| Bing map does not work on a website that is configured to use the HTTPS protocol because of a Mixed Content error. | 525268 | 309922 |
Creative Exchange export operations are interrupted if links contain invalid Href attributes. | 524464 | 309955 |
The performance of the Page rendering process is poor due to excessive calls to the Template Engine. | 521442 | 310071 |
The performance of the Page rendering process is poor because the Asset Links Generator makes excessive use of the assetService pipeline. | 521442 | 310089 |
If you enter a question mark in the value of the Data attributes for a rendering variant, it breaks the HTML markup. | 825403 | 311853 |
If the name of a site contains a dash, rendering variants with query elements that are used in a Partial Design fail to render data. | 312574 | |
| Trying to add composite data source sub-items produces a dialog with the incorrect tree item selected. | 525618 | 313329 |
| The data source of a snippet disappears when you add the snippet to the 10th dynamic placeholder. | 525812 | 315409 |
The enumeration of the Link Wrapper Options field is empty. | 529336, 530386 | 326111 |
If a page has an empty __Renderings field, the upgrade script fails. | 528248 | 324153 |
| When you export a site through Creative Exchange, language names are incorrectly cut from the URLs. | 528470 | 323170 |
Nested snippets do not have the correct data source value when the parent snippet is automatically copied using the data source behaviour functionality. | 526502 | 318089 |
If you install SXA, the Content Testing functionality cannot be disabled. | 524776, 526398 | 316998 |
| If you define a rendering variant field and use it on a mobile device, an infinite recursion can occur when the page is loaded. | 526602, 537373, 536173, 534593, 532436, 530186, 527534 | 315324 |