Adding HtmlCache Viewing Feature to Sitecore.Rocks Visual Studio Extension

It is copy of my article placed in Sagittarius blog. 

After writing an article about viewing Sitecore HTML cache, I thought that it is not convenient to move custom code from one project to another. When, instead, there is ability to extend widely used existing Sitecore development tool Sitecore.Rocks then it should be done. I decided to contribute into it.

First of all, you need to fork Sitecore.Rocks project on GitHub.

    Sitecore.Rocks works like server-client application. You have server side (Sitecore.Rocks.Server, connector in other words) that is copied to all Sitecore websites and client side: interface in Visual Studio to display different things from Sitecore. Fortunately, there is already “Data” column for cache viewer to display cache details and we don’t need to modify interface to add something new. But this column shows only path to item, when cache key is Sitecore identifier. In all other cases Data column will be empty. Let’s extend amount of data that could be shown in this column.

     Logic that returns data to be displayed in this table located in /src/Sitecore.Rocks.Server/Requests/Caches/GetCacheKeys.cs file. We can modify it and add ability to return cache value when cache type is string or id:

    After building a solution, we need copy Sitecore.Rocks.Server.dll to bin folder of our website. Now, you are able to see what it inside cache. If you are interested in viewing other types of cache(not only string and id) then you are able to extend code above with your needs.

If my pull request is accepted, then this feature will be available in one of next Sitecore.Rocks version.