Orchard Harvest Program, Tenant Clusters - This week in Orchard (19/05/2023)

Allow displaying an icon for Custom Settings, add Admin Culture Picker docs, demo about Tenant Clusters, and most importantly, the program of the Orchard Harvest is now available! Let's get started!

Orchard Core updates

Allow displaying an icon for Custom Settings

You can create a setting using Custom Settings and set the item icon in the menu that came with it. It wasn't really possible before this change because the .Id(type.Name.HtmlClassify()) and .AddClass(type.Name.HtmlClassify()) weren't applied in the AdminMenu of the CustomSettings module meaning it was not possible to override this menu item with a shape named NavigationItemText-NAME_OF_SETTINGS.Id. From now on, the CustomSettings module allows us to set the icon of the newly added menu item.

Allow to display icon for Custom Settings

Add Admin Culture Picker docs

A few weeks ago, we mentioned that you have the option to add an admin culture picker for the admin site and have a dropdown in the admin panel header to switch languages. And of course, when adding new features to Orchard Core, we always keep in mind the flexibility and the reusability that Orchard Core can provide to the developers. Meaning, you can override and customize the shapes which are responsible to display the admin culture picker. Now we have some lines in the documentation about the two shapes that are responsible for displaying the admin culture.

Admin Culture Picker shapes documentation

Demos

Tenant Clusters

This demo is about a work-in-progress feature for Orchard Core that distributes requests across tenant clusters using Microsoft Yarp.ReverseProxy. If you check out the following recording, you can easily get up to speed with the current state of this upcoming feature. Here we want to highlight some of the more exciting parts of this addition:

  • We first use the Yarp Configuration to define Routes and Clusters with many options. Each Route is tied to a Cluster composed of Destination(s) on which load balancing can be applied.
  • We only need one catch-all RouteTemplate and multiple Clusters on which we can configure a custom SlotRange[min, max] property (up to 16384 slots).
  • Each tenant has a unique slot hash, so a unique Slot then belongs to the Cluster having the slot in its SlotRange. The Cluster can have multiple Destination(s). We could have used a Cluster having Nodes, but we follow the Yarp Config having a Clusters list of Cluster type.

Clusters app settings

  • The same application can run as a proxy or behind it (we check the headers), the advantage with our distributed services is when as a proxy we are still aware of all tenant's data. So, on a request, we can use the same RunningShellTable to know the tenant, then select the right Cluster based on the tenant slot hash (in a custom middleware), and let Yarp selects one of its Destination(s).
  • To compute a tenant slot hash, we use the CRC-16/XMODEM algorithm (same as Redis uses for clustering keys) applied on the new TenantId property, which allows us to automatically spread out new tenants on the slots and then on the configured Clusters. This knowing that the CRC-16 is fast to compute and always returns the same number for the same TenantId, so a tenant stays on the same Cluster.

News from the community

Orchard Harvest Online Program

As many of you know, we have been working hard over the past months to organize the next Orchard Harvest in Las Vegas after the last Harvest in 2017. Unfortunately, based on the current economic situation and personal feedback, Las Vegas won’t work this year. Not to mention that unfortunately Microsoft Build, announced after we decided on our dates, also falls in line with the original dates we chose. So, a date change was also necessary.

However, we did not want to let go of this opportunity to meet completely. Therefore, we are pleased to inform you that we will be holding our first online Orchard Harvest starting on the 31st of May at 13:00 UTC. You can start your registration for the event right now.

And in the meantime, the program of the conference is available on the official site of Orchard Core! Please welcome the below selection of awesome talks by community members!

Orchard Harvest 2023 Program

Orchard Dojo Newsletter

Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 458 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard of the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post is published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course.

Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here!

If you are interested in more news about Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this Orchard meeting!