Alf Nilsson talks

After my upgrade of Stockholm Pride to EPiServer 7 CMS (blog post coming soon) I wanted the project to be a bit more shiny with some Code Managed Page Types.

I forked Erik Nordin’s utility to create classes for PageTypeBuilder in an existing project. Did some research on what attributes I needed to create a similar thing with EPiServer 7 CMS.

As a bonus I also gave it a little more EPiServer look-and-feel:

Since I don’t know if I should commit this back to Erik Nordin’s GitHub or not, you can download it from GitHub.

Current status

I would see this as a first draft of the creation tool that worked quite good for my upgrade of Stockholm Pride.

It creates Properties for the most common properties in EPiServer but gives a template where you can decide if you want to go with a BackingTypeAttribute or using EditorDescriptors/UIHints instead (see below).

Attributes and value types

I’ve tried to cover all correct DataTypes Attributes such as replacing PropertyImageUrl with Url and setting UIHints but I still thinks it needs some more cleaning.

Note that since I only check for what’s in the database, avoid running this tool while already having Page Types Classes in your project.

Custom Properties

For now, the support for Custom Properties are not that great. I try to read out what kind of Data Value the Properties are meant to return but leave a code comment to those Properties I don’t know what to do with.

This way you can make a search for //DefinitionType= and decide for yourself if you want to use the UIHintAttribute or the BackingFieldAttribute to solve this problem.

Some of the older EPiServer Properties are obsolete which mean that they should not be used as a BackingField.

UILanguageProperty is one of them which luckily is only a property that returns a string, but the Editor may select among all activated Languages.

By reflection I can find out exactly how that list is populated.

Example of EditorDescriptor

This means that UILanguageProperty can easily be replaced with an EditorDescriptor that gives the same functionality:

//DefinitionType=EPiServer.SpecializedProperties.PropertyUILanguage
//[BackingType(typeof(PropertyUILanguage))] -- PropertyUILanguage has been obsoleted and will be removed in a future release.
[UIHint("UILanguage")]
[Display(Name = "Content Language")]
public virtual string ContentLanguage { get; set; }

[EditorDescriptorRegistration(TargetType = typeof(string), UIHint = "UILanguage")]
public class UILanguageEditorDescriptor : EditorDescriptor
{
   public override void ModifyMetadata(ExtendedMetadata metadata, IEnumerable<Attribute> attributes)
   {
      SelectionFactoryType = typeof(UILanguageSelectionFactory);
      ClientEditingClass = "epi.cms.contentediting.editors.SelectionEditor";

      base.ModifyMetadata(metadata, attributes);
   }
}

public class UILanguageSelectionFactory : ISelectionFactory
{
   public IEnumerable<ISelectItem> GetSelections(ExtendedMetadata metadata)
   {
      var languages = new List<SelectItem>();
      foreach (System.Globalization.CultureInfo info in LocalizationService.Current.AvailableLocalizations)
      {
         string nativeName = info.NativeName;
         if (info.TextInfo.ANSICodePage != 0x4e4)
         {
            nativeName = nativeName + string.Format(" ({0})", info.EnglishName);
         }
         languages.Add(new SelectItem { Value = info.Name, Text = nativeName });
      }
      return languages;
   }
}