If you think you have seen it all using a specific technology such as Coveo on your Sitecore implementation, think again. Every implementation is different, every client is unique and every challenge YES is a special beast. 🙂
With this brand new Coveo implementation we just delivered in two important phases had its own set of problems we had battle and solve. In this post I want to share a snippet of each and how we tackled each of it.
- Sitecore Architecture Limitation/s: When you are adding another layer of implementation on top of stood up system there is always challenges. It depends on how Sitecore was built. Was it built with Experience editor working correctly. Latest versions of Coveo highly depends on this assumption. We had similar issue on this, so, we created a content item added all presentation components we need and copied the presentation over to standard values of concern. We had another issue to battle, Requirement was to show some Sitecore items on Coveo Interfaces as results, but…They don’t have presentation and hence no Link or what so ever. We had to add a pipeline to make that happen and generate apt URL for these items that we want to send the user to.
We injected a new processor that would generate the URL of specific items in coveoPostItemProcessingPipeline section. Index was now showing up with all the correct URL’s - Variant Implementation : Like with most of commerce implementations, we had what were called base products and variants under each base products. We wanted to showcase variants as beautiful swatches that end user can explore if they are interested. For this client, it was very important to show special variant when a special property was selected from Facet available. To make this happen which data should be tied to index on which type of item was very important to analyse and acted upon based on experience that we were after. After that, it was pretty straightforward to implement variants leveraging grouping on Coveo Query Pipelines.
- Price Filter Issues : So, again, every customer wants their Price look and behave differently. Some like Slider, Some like Range and in our case it was just basically a string. This was done to adhere to their original implementation which they like. But, since it was multi language and multi site we ran in to challenges on how to have different fields on Index and how to use the different ones per language/site per context. This is because same field for all currencies would pull incorrect values as Facet Options.
As a workaround, we loaded which field to Facet on based on Context. This resolved our issue of inconsistent values displayed on Facet. Another issue we faced is Custom Sort, since it is string it was hard to make Custom Sort work through Data Attributes on Coveo Rendering properties. We had do a patch on Javascript side on event preprocessResults to make this requirement meet. It has an object called groupByResults which can be modified to achieve specific order we need.
There were some more interesting challenges we encountered while deploying and testing post Go Live, I will cover those in my next blog. 🙂