Alf Nilsson talks

I’ve found a neat way to improve the editor experience – IContentTypeAdvisor and it can be found in the EPiServer.Cms.Shell.UI.Rest namespace of the assembly EPiServer.Cms.Shell.UI.dll.

This interface is used to populate the list of suggested Content Types when creating new content.

This interface has one method GetSuggestions which returns an collection of ids of block types and takes the following input parameters:

• iContent Parent
  The parent item where the editor wants to create the new content.
• bool contentFolder
  This is true if the editor is creating your new content within a Content Asset Folder.
• IEnumerable<string> requestedTypes
  This is a list of the kind of content to create. The value comes from the UI and therefore they are just strings like “episerver.core.blockdata” or “episerver.core.pagedata”. If created through a component in the asset pane it can also have the value of the CreateableTypes.

The default implementation in Episerver is to suggest the same content types as already created.

An example of usage would be to help the editor create a slideshow where the slideshow including each slide in it are blocks.

So what I want to do is to suggest the Slide block if the editor already has created a Slideshow block in that same folder.

CUT TO THE CODE

First of all I’ve have some new Block Types, one for the Slideshow that has a ContentArea where you put each slide represented by a SlideBlock.

And I will need to create an implementation of the IContentTypeAdvisor.

[ServiceConfiguration(typeof(IContentTypeAdvisor))]
public class ContentTypeAdvisor : IContentTypeAdvisor
{
    public IEnumerable<int> GetSuggestions(IContent parent, bool contentFolder, IEnumerable<string> requestedTypes)
    {
        ...
    }
}

Note that I’m registering this to Episerver’s IOC using the ServiceConfigurationAttribute. This is to tell Episerver that I want to use this implementation.

Episerver looks for all registered implementations of this interface instead of just 1, therefore I don’t need to do anything with the previous registrations (unless I want to, see further down).

What I want the advisor to do is check is whether the parent has any children that is a Slideshow block. If so the advisor will suggest the Slide Block.

This is quite easy as can be seen in my SlideshowContentTypeAdvisor.

It is also a good practice to check whether the suggested content type (in this case the Slide Block) is available as child to the content parent and that the editor has the proper access rights to create a Slide Block).

But I want to use my Content Type advisor INSTEAD of the Default one?

It’s easy to remove the already registered implementation of IContentTypeAdvisor by implementing the IConfigurableModule interface, remove the current registrations and to register your own implementation instead.

Look at my DependencyResolverInitialization for that.

Disable the “Suggested Content Types” feature

Look at DependencyResolverInitialization and just don’t register your own IContentTypeAdvisor after ejecting the existing registrations.

This will remove all registered implementations and your editor will never see any suggested content types.