Page History

XperienCentral R36

Release date: June 15, 2022

<br />

Check Configuration Files

See Check Configuration Files.

SEO Updates

In R35 and earlier, the application_settings.friendly_url_extension setting was used to determine whether a URL is friendly. In R36 and higher, it's possible to leave the friendly URL extension empty which calculates friendly URLs without extensions. This means that the way that a URL is checked for being friendly has been changed. A new setting has been introduced in the startup_settings section of the General tab of the Setup Tool: seo_path. The value in this field is used to determine if a URL is friendly or not. For example, assume that Apache is not configured to remove /web/ from a URL. In that case a friendly URL in versions R35 or earlier would be /web/home.htm. In versions R36 and higher, it would be /web/seo/myweb.htm.

To make sure this works as intended check the following settings in the Setup tool:

website_settings.friendly_url_prefix

In R35, the default value was /${startup_settings.context}. When Apache is not used to remove the /web/ prefix, this setting should be updated to

/${startup_settings.context}/${startup_settings.seo_path}

If Apache is used, this field is usually empty and can be left as is.

startup_settings.seo_path

The value of this field should be set to seo by default. If this field is not present in the startup_settings.xml check with your hosting provider if a different startup_config.xml is used than the one shipped with the deploy of XperienCentral. In that case, the following line should be added:

<entry name="seo_path" value=$(webmanager seopath)" />

Please also make sure that all changes in settings.xml have been applied.

context_static

The setting application_settings.context_static has been removed in XperienCentral R36. You must modify any custom code that uses this setting to use application_settings.static_files_url instead.

Changes to Apache

A minor change needs to be done to the vhost configuration in Apache to make sure XperienCentral keeps working. Most installations should have something along these lines to redirect requests from Apache to XperienCentral:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/web/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/admin/
RewriteRule ^/(.*)\.htm$ /web/$1.htm [PT,L]

The last line should be updated to

RewriteRule ^/(.*)\.htm$ /web/seo/$1.htm [PT,L]

This applies to both the back- and frontend vhost configurations.

In order to run XperienCentral without extensions at all, see Running XperienCentral without a Friendly URL Extension.

Update your Solr Configuration

In R36, the Solr version has been upgraded to version 8.11.1, therefore you must make the following changes:

In solrconfig.xml, change the declaration:

<luceneMatchVersion>6.6.6</luceneMatchVersion>

to

<luceneMatchVersion>8.11.1</luceneMatchVersion>

The eDismax query parser parameter lowercaseOperators now defaults to false if the luceneMatchVersion in solrconfig.xml is 7.0.0 or above, therefore you must set the lowercaseOperators parameter explicitly to true:

<bool name="lowercaseOperators">true</bool>

The following spatial-related fields have been removed:

• LatLonType
• GeoHashField
• SpatialVectorFieldType
• SpatialTermQueryPrefixTreeFieldType

Choose one of these field types instead:

• LatLonPointSpatialField
• SpatialRecursivePrefixTreeField
• RptWithGeometrySpatialField

Extra Steps

1. Stop Tomcat if it is running.
2. Remove the directory <webmanager-root>/work/searchengine.
3. If you have a custom solrconfig.xml, you need to modify it — open it in a text editor.
4. Save your custom solrconfig.xml.
5. Start Tomcat.
6. Log in to XperienCentral.

Real-time indexing

If you use real-time indexing (the XperienCentral Realtime Indexing reusable):

1. Navigate to Configuration > Realtime Indexing.
2. Select the "Indexing" tab.
3. Select all the websites that you want to index in the top part of the panel.
4. Click [Index selected items].

No real-time indexing

If you do not use real-time indexing (the XperienCentral Realtime Indexing reusable):

1. Open the Setup Tool.
2. Select the Search Tools tab.
3. Click [Index] in the "INDEX URL" section.

Rebuild the Content Index

Due to a change in the Search functionality, you must rebuild the content index. To do so, manually remove the <webmanager-root>/work/contentindex directory after the upgrade and allow it to be regenerated after restarting XperienCentral. Selecting contentindex_queue_empty_reindex in the General tab of the Setup Tool is not sufficient.