Alf Nilsson talks

You might have seen that the field “Name in URL” first gives you the value and the editor needs to click “change” to edit it.

You can also accomplish this on your normal string properties by using the UI Hint “previewabletext” (also found as the constant UIHint.PreviewableText).

[Display(Name = "My Property")]
[UIHint(UIHint.PreviewableText)]
public virtual string MyProperty { get; set; }

And it will look like this:

My main project is a multi website solution where 16 different websites is sharing the same source code.

Sometimes when we need to change specific Content Type and find a strategy on how to migrate the changes it’s good to know how much that Content Type is used, and in what way.

How do you do that?

A way to to find how much it is used is to perform a simple SQL Query:

SELECT c.pkID FROM tblContent c
INNER JOIN tblContentType ct ON c.fkContentTypeID = ct.pkID
WHERE ... = '...' -- various ways to identify your Content Type using pkID, ContentTypeGUID or Name

And go to Episerver Edit Mode to see how the editor has worked with each content.

But to be able to run the SQL query, you will need to have access to the production database which makes things a little more annoying. Specially if you need to use VPN connections or similar.

Therefore I have created an Admin Tool called “Find My Content” where you easily can find all content based on their Content Types.

Listing all Content Types

Here you see how many items of this Content Type is created by clicking the Name.

Details of a Content Type

In the details you can see all Content of this Content Type and which language they are created in. There is also a shortcut that will take you to Edit mode for that specific Content.

How do I get it?

I’m waiting for a NuGet package to be published on Episerver’s NuGet feed. Otherwise you can find the code on my GitHub.

Update: It is now available in the feed: https://nuget.episerver.com/en/OtherPages/Package/?packageId=Toders.FindMyContent

What’s next?

This was just something I threw together since I got tired connecting to my client’s environments using VPN and Remote Desktop.

I’ve got some ideas to add references between the different content, filtering on values for specific properties and so on.

Do you have any other ideas that would be nice to have in this tool? Just give me a shout in the comments below.

Years pass and hopefully you learn something and become better!

One thing that have been poking on my conscience for a while is the old EPiEventHelper that I blogged about a couple of years ago.

What’s wrong with it?

There are two things I don’t like with it.

1) Unclear usage

I have seen that it has been some confusion with how to best access the content – using the eventArgs.Content or using this.

public class StandardPage : PageData, IPublishingContent
{
    public void PublishingContent(object sender, ContentEventArgs e)
    {
        // this is how to access the already cast instance of the content.
        StandardPage standardPage = this;

        //This is the content from the argument, needs to be casted to your Content Type. But to me it feels more correct.
        IContent contentFromArgument = e.Content;
    }

}

A common question is if the e.Content and this are two different instances (they are the same) and which one should be used (honestly I don’t have a recommendation).

2) Single Responsibility Principle

The second thing is that this implementation violates the Single Responsibility Principle. The class representing your Content Type should been seen as a View Model or Data Model and therefore it should not contain any behavior or business logic.

I have seen some examples where the logic found in the event is really large, making the Content Type class very messy and hard to understand.

Presenting – EPiEventHelper 3.0

What? Why 3.0?

Pavel Nezhencev already created a NuGet package with EPiEventHelper and later upgraded it to use Episerver 10, calling it version 2.0. If I want to publish my version with new features to NuGet.org I need to bump the version even further.

What’s new?

First of all I have stopped checking if the current Content implements the event interface. Instead I’m using to use the IoC container in Episerver where you as a developer can add your own things.

This means that you will need to decorate your implementations of the interfaces with the ServiceConfiguration attribute.

[ServiceConfiguration(typeof(IPublishingContent))]
public class PublishingContentEvent : IPublishingContent
{
    public void PublishingContent(object sender, ContentEventArgs e)
    {
        IContent content = e.Content;
        var standardPage = content as StandardPage;
        if (standardPage == null)
            return;

        // Do something with your standard page
    }
}

Breaking change: This also means that if you are using the previous version of EPiEventHelper, you can no longer refer to the content using this!

public void PublishingContent(object
    sender, ContentEventArgs e)
{
    this.Name = "Hello World!";
}

public void PublishingContent(object
    sender, ContentEventArgs e)
{
        e.Content.Name = "Hello World!";
}

Breaking change: The interface does not know anything about the class representing your Content Type and therefore you will need to cast e.Content yourself!

public void PublishingContent(object
    sender, ContentEventArgs e)
{
    this.Title = "Hello World!";
}

public void PublishingContent(object sender,
    ContentEventArgs e)
{
        var content = e.Content as StandardPage;
        if (content == null)
            return;

        content.Title = "Hello World!";
}

Unless…

I have created a workaround for this where you can have the same pattern to bind the Episerver events, but only apply if to specific Content Types AND the Content will also be typed!

New functionality: Each interface have an abstract base class where you specify which Content Type class you want to use. As usual you use the ServiceConfiguration attribute to bind your implementation to the event.

[ServiceConfiguration(typeof(IPublishingContent))]
public class PublishingStandardPage : PublishingContentBase<StandardPage>
{
    protected override void PublishingContent(object sender, TypedContentEventArgs e)
    {
        // Here you can access the standard page
        StandardPage standardPage = e.Content;
    }
}

You can also specify if the Content that the event applies to needs to be the exact Content Type or that the class would inherit from it by overriding the boolean property AllowInheritance.

protected override bool AllowInheritance { get { return true; } }

Tests

I’m still learning how to best create tests with Episerver, so I have added a Test Project where I want to test if the events are bound and unbound properly.

I have also added some tests to make sure that I have not missed any interfaces or classes. The project is found in the same GitHub Repo.

You’re welcome!

I would really recommend that you take your time to extract the code for your events from the Content Types.
Just putting the ServiceConfiguration attribute on your Content Types would instantiate the class in a way that doesn’t always play well with Episerver.

I’m planning to update the NuGet feed with my new version! Keep your eyes open for updates in Visual Studio if you have used the previous version.

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.