Blog posts by dataguy

.net user controls – stop using String.Split() instead use ParseChildren

2010-11-08T14:54:00.0000000Z

Last year a bright young developer (actually he was my senior) asked why I was not using ParseChildren as a cleaner way of parsing data into a .NET user control.
Still struggling I found an article here which helped a lot. You can also check out MSDN here

We call the football.ascx in the calling aspx file

<uc2:FootballTeams ID="MyTeams" runat="server" ><Teams><uc2:Team name="Man Utd" /><uc2:Team name="Chelsea" /></Teams></uc2:FootballTeams>

Here is where the work is done. Couple of things if you set ChildrenAsProperties=false you can render groups of controls instead of properties. As a footnote base.Render(writer) outputs the markup in the football.ascx.cs file of the the user control.

Below shows the local variables available from the code behind in the calling aspx file

Save editors from breaking the PageTree

2010-11-04T10:02:00.0000000Z

I was on a project where editors were dragging EPiServer Pages all over the Page Tree. This behaviour broke the application several times because there was also a lack of error trapping. Fair play it was a new EPiServer team and we were all finding our way.

There are a number of EPiServer.DataFactory events that can help us here. For a full list refer to the SDK DataFactor members section.

In the example below I have placed the logic in global.asax which can be used to enforce business rules for creation of a page.

public class Global : EPiServer.Global{protected void Application_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e){DataFactory.Instance.CreatingPage += new PageEventHandler(OnCreatingPage);}public void OnCreatingPage(object sender, PageEventArgs e){// place your validation logic here       ////  e.CancelAction = true;  //  e.CancelReason = "Sorry you can't create this Page Type here";}}

Using the PageEventsArgs e we can expose the necessary intellisense properties to cancel the action. The CancelReason is the Exception message which can be caught by a try catch block wrapped around the method call that was used to try and create page.

In the below example we set the Text property of Button1 with the e.CancelReason from global.asax.

try{DataFactory.Instance.Save(myNewPageData, DataAccess.SaveAction.Publish, Security.AccessLevel.NoAccess);}catch (Exception ex){Button1.Text = ex.Message;return;}

There lots of events you can use in this way all you have to do is refer to the EPiServer CMS 6 SDK DataFactory members.

Creating multiple language pages

2010-11-03T16:55:00.0000000Z

For this example I am using Public Templates demo from http://world.episerver.com/ as my base.

In the code snippet below two EPiServer pages are created based on the [Public] Standard page. One for English and the second one for Swedish

public enum KnownPageID : int { StartPage = 26, ExampleRootBranch = 39 }protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e){           var myPageData = DataFactory.Instance.GetPage(new PageReference((int)KnownPageID.ExampleRootBranch));var myNewPageData = DataFactory.Instance.GetDefaultPageData(myPageData.PageLink, "[Public] Standard page");myNewPageData.PageName = "New page (en)";DataFactory.Instance.Save(myNewPageData, DataAccess.SaveAction.Publish, Security.AccessLevel.NoAccess); var newLanguageBranch = DataFactory.Instance.CreateLanguageBranch(myNewPageData.PageLink, new LanguageSelector("sv"));newLanguageBranch.PageName = "Nytt sida (sv)"; try{DataFactory.Instance.Save(newLanguageBranch, DataAccess.SaveAction.Publish, Security.AccessLevel.NoAccess);}catch (Exception ex){throw ex;}}