Szymon Kuzniak

I was about to demo the connection between Sitecore Content Hub and Sitecore XP, and I though that apart from regular content elements, such as articles or blog posts, I could maybe synchronize also products. I was quite surprised, when I found out that I can’t acutally synchronize majority of the fields of my products because… they are multi-lingual.

When I first tried to synchronize the product, I started getting following exceptions in the log files

19756 23:56:42 ERROR [Sitecore Connect for Content Hub]: An error occured during converting 'VolumeLabel' field to '{F7DE3FC9-70CC-482C-95A3-558CB3127C26}' field. Field mapping ID: '{31B3FCE4-1E66-4F2F-96B3-0A4DB3BDF8E1}'.
Exception: System.InvalidOperationException
Message: Culture is required for culture sensitive properties.
Source: Stylelabs.M.Sdk
   at Stylelabs.M.Sdk.Models.Base.EntityBase.GetPropertyValue(String name)
   at Sitecore.Connector.CMP.Pipelines.ImportEntity.SaveFieldValues.TryMapConfiguredFields(ImportEntityPipelineArgs args)

My first thought - I have probably selected incorrect mapping template or did not provide the culture. However, upon further investigation, I noticed there is no other template for mapping Content Hub’s multilanguage fields.

Fortunately, thanks to Sitecore’s extensibility, I was able to write a small processor, which will fill this little gap.

A bit of theory first.

The connector configuration can be found in App_Config\Modules\Sitecore.Connector.CMP folder. There are three files - the one I was interested in is called Sitecore.Connector.CMP.config. The connector uses pipeline cmp.importEntity to process imported entities, so all I had to do was to identify correct processor. The one with type Sitecore.Connector.CMP.Pipelines.ImportEntity.SaveFieldValues seemed like a good fit.

With a little help of dotpeek, I have confirmed this is a problem with connector - there is either a relation mapping (not relevant in my case), or field mapping, which uses entity.GetPropertyValue(name) method. This method is throwing the InvalidOperationException when called with a multilanguage property name.

The plan to fix.

1. Create a separate field mapping template with versioned Culture field (so it can be filled in different cultures)
2. Create a processor which will inherit from Sitecore.Connector.CMP.Pipelines.ImportEntity.SaveFieldValues
3. Handle the new template in the new processor
4. Fallback to base implementation for the existing templates

The templates

I had to create one base template - CMP Culture Settings with a single, versioned field to store the culture. Then I created a mapping template and make it inherit from templates: CMP Culture Settings, CMP Field Name Settings and Sitecore Field Name Settings. I also had to update the insert options for Entity Mapping template, to allow creating items based on new template.

The code of the processor

And finally the configuration that has to be installed in the App_Config/Include folder.

Now the import of multilanguage fields should be working.

Happy coding!