How to set default language as 'en' in case language version is not created in sitecore

Question

In my sitecore website, there is a tricky requirement in redirects. There are external redirects which are moving from sharepoint to sitecore item to some external redirect. For ex : /abc.aspx (sharepoint_URL) to /abc (sitecore item) to http://abc.ly (external URL).

In /abc (sitecore item) we have only english version of item whereas http://abc.ly can have many language version. If website is cookied in english than its working properly, in other languages its showing 404 error page which is genuine because of version count is 0 over there.

Requirement is if there is not other language version of item than it should point to 'en' version i.e global. Restriction is that versioning of item in sitecore is not acceptable to marketers, and i dont want to use fallback module right now. What i tried is :

Language currentLang = Sitecore.Context.Language;
                    Language LangEn= Language.Parse("en");
                    if(currentLang !=LangEn)
                    { currentLang =LangEn;
                    }
                    Item versionItem = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem(Context.Item.ID, currentLang);


                    if (versionItem.Versions.Count == 0){ // do something }`

Kindly suggest ASAP

Answer 1

I think you may want to look into language fallback. There is a module on the marketplace to help you do this.

That being said, given the field is shared it will take far less time to just log into Sitecore and create a version in each language.

If this is going to be happening often, you could create a command template which will run code to create the item in all languages. That might save your authors some time.

Answer 2

I got a very precise solution over here [http://www.roundedcube.com/Blog/2010/tackling-fallback-fields-and-values-in-sitecore] where I just needed to add a processor in config and made a class accordingly. It did work for me.

<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />
<processor type="YourAssemblyHere.Pipelines.HttpRequest.FallbackLanguageProcessor, YourAssemblyHere " />
<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.LayoutResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />

And add the corresponding class to your project.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
namespace YourAssemblyHere.Pipelines.HttpRequest
{
public class FallbackLanguageProcessor
{
public void Process(Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.HttpRequestArgs args)
{
Sitecore.Data.Items.Item contextItem = Sitecore.Context.Item;
if (contextItem == null || contextItem.Versions.Count > 0)
return;


Sitecore.Globalization.Language language = Sitecore.Context.Language;
if (Sitecore.Context.Language.Name != "en")
language = Sitecore.Globalization.Language.Parse("en");
Sitecore.Data.Database contextDatabase = Sitecore.Context.Database;
Sitecore.Context.Item = contextDatabase.GetItem(Sitecore.Context.Item.ID, language);
}
}
}

Thanks for suggestion and more ideas are most welcome.