Page Objects in EPiServer CMS 6
Another new exciting feature in CMS 6 (RC onwards) is the joining of forces between CMS pages (PageData) and objects that can be stored in the Dynamic Data Store, a.k.a. Page Objects.
Of course this can be handled manually by the programmer by storing an object in the DDS and then keeping track of it somehow as Alan demonstrates here.
However, since Alan wrote that blog article we have developed Page Objects so you don’t have to worry about the connection between the page and the DDS object.
Page Objects behave like CMS Page Properties when in comes to versioning and language support. That means that each version of a page gets its own copy of Page Objects. However, under the covers it is quite smart and will only point to its own copy when the version of the object differs from the original, which means better performance.
Another advantage of using Page Objects instead of rolling your own page – DDS hookup is that you get free Import/Export and Mirroring support for the objects.
The new PageObjects property (.NET property) can be found on the PageData class. It behaves like a .NET dictionary so you add and access your objects with the use of a key.
Happy coding and remember, use Page Objects and the DDS responsibly! Reading a massive object graph every time a page in CMS renders will not give you the happiest of experiences (even with caching).
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