Andy Butland

Recently I've been reading - and recommend - the book Building Evolutionary Architectures by by Neal Ford,‎ Rebecca Parsons and Patrick Kua, where they discuss the concept of a fitness function . The idea here is that, as well as implementing the business requirements, a solution will also need to address certain non-functional concerns, such as security, performance, reliability and maintainability. Some of these can be measured or validated, and therefore tested, and ideally, tested in an automated way. Within a Sitecore project I'm working on, we are adhering to the Helix principles that in part addresses the organisation of projects with a Visual Studio solution. You end up with many individual projects, each within a layer - foundation, feature and project. The foundation layer is considered the highest level and most stable. Projects within this layer may have dependencies on each other, but not on any at the lower levels. Feature layer projects are intende...

As well as displaying the appropriate HTML and content, a Sitecore rendering controller can also be used to handle to form posts . As such you can have a single controller responsible for rendering the mark-up of a form and handling the POST request that's triggered when the form is submitted. With this setup, I wanted to add some progressive enhancement and use the same form processing logic to handle an AJAX request. Using JavaScript we could hijack the form submission and make an AJAX request using the Fetch API . In the controller action method we can detect that an AJAX request is being made, and if so return a small JSON response, instead of the standard redirect back to the page to display a confirmation message. This is quite a common pattern with ASP.Net MVC, making use of the Request.IsAjaxRequest() method available in the controller. (As a quick aside, in order to use this method in an AJAX request triggered via the Fetch API, it's necessary to add a head...