Lucene: Compression support not configured

I got this error when trying to extract Hits.Doc from Lucene:

Compression support not configured

at SupportClass.CompressionSupport.CheckCompressionSupport()
at SupportClass.CompressionSupport.Uncompress(Byte[] input)
at Lucene.Net.Index.FieldsReader.Uncompress(Byte[] input)
at Lucene.Net.Index.FieldsReader.AddField(Document doc, FieldInfo fi, Boolean binary, Boolean compressed, Boolean tokenize)
at Lucene.Net.Index.FieldsReader.Doc(Int32 n, FieldSelector fieldSelector)
at Lucene.Net.Index.SegmentReader.Document(Int32 n, FieldSelector fieldSelector)
at Lucene.Net.Index.IndexReader.Document(Int32 n)
at Lucene.Net.Search.IndexSearcher.Doc(Int32 i)
at Lucene.Net.Search.Hits.Doc(Int32 n)

The solution was to add the following missing keys into Sitecore AppSettings.config:

<add key="Lucene.Net.FSDirectory.class" value="Sitecore.Data.Indexing.FSDirectory, Sitecore.Kernel" />
<add key="Lucene.Net.CompressionLib.class" value="Sitecore.IO.Compression, Sitecore.Kernel" />

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.

I get this error from time to time when editing plain text files in Visual Studio. I tried correcting it by going to File, Save As, Save with Encoding (in the Save dropdown). This seemed to do the trick about 50% of the time. However, it would seem this was just coincidence. Latest findings suggest it is a Firefox cache problem. I tried the same URL in another browser and it worked. Fingers crossed this is a fix.

Non white space characters cannot be added to content.

When trying to initialise an XDocument with a string containing XML, I kept getting the error:

Unhandled Exception: System.ArgumentException: Non white space characters cannot be added to content.

With help from a colleague, and recalling how I'd got around this error previously, the solution is to use the static XDocument.Parse( string ) method. Eg:

var myXDoc = XDocument.Parse( xmlString );

SOAP header Security was not understood

XML Web services seem to be declining in use, so finding information on this SoapHeaderException proved to be a bit difficult. I added in <soapextensionimportertypes> and installed WSE 3.0, but it made no difference. What worked for me was adding the following line to my code:

webService.SoapVersion =
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapProtocolVersion.Soap12;

[Edit 9 Dec 2010]

Actually, this was a red herring. It worked by adding a "service reference", rather than a old-fashioned "web reference".

Using Sitecore with Firefox, Chrome and other browsers

Sitecore recommends the use of IE for its client. When trying to log in with Firefox or Chrome (and presumably others), you don't get the option of viewing the desktop. There is a way you can override this behaviour. Open Sitecore in IE and go to the User Manager. Select your account and click Edit to bring up the "Edit User" dialogue. Click on the Profile tab and set the start URL to "Desktop". Save your changes and then try logging in with Firefox, etc. You should now see the full desktop.

Sitecore link fields put /home in the target URL's href

When using sc:fld('fieldname', ., 'url') in an XSLT rendering to get a link field's target URL, you will find that the href includes '/home'. This is rarely desirable. Thankfully, it's easy to solve. Simply use sc:fld('fieldname', ., 'id') instead to get the target ID. You can then pass the ID to sc:path().

How to remove an apostrophe from a string in Sitecore XSLT

Given a variable named "string", you can remove apostrophes by declaring a variable to hold the apostrophe and then passing that to the sc:Replace method:

<xsl:variable name="apos">'</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="string"
select="sc:Replace( $input, $apos, '' )" />