Example of baseclass and access to StartPage in your CMS 7 projects

When you start developing your EPiServer CMS 7 website you will get the new features for building pagetypes directly in code. An important message at the developer course is to create your own base class for the templates and user controls that you develop in your project. When you start developing you will probably have to reference your StartPage from time to time, we often have global settings and other important properties on the startpage. For instance you might have properties on the startpage where you change information in the site footer or links to external sites. This is a great way of using the startpage since we have access to that page via the API in EPiServer:

   1: PageReference.StartPage;

   2:  

   3: ContentReference.StartPage;

When we get our properties from the startpage we can now use the ServiceLocater helper class in CMS 7 and ContentRepository() combined with the new and shiny Get<T>:

   1: var prop = 

   2: Locate.ContentRepository().Get<StartPageType>(ContentReference.StartPage).YourProperty;

Doing this all the time is not that funny when binding lists and other functions in for instance the site footer. So instead of doing this all the time we create a base class for both usercontrols and templates. In this base class we add our StartPage-object:

   1: public class SiteUserControlBase : EPiServer.UserControlBase

   2:     {

   3:         private StartPageType mStartPage;

   4:  

   5:         /// <summary>

   6:         /// Start page for the web site

   7:         /// </summary>

   8:         public StartPageType StartPage

   9:         {

  10:             get

  11:             {

  12:                 if (mStartPage == null)

  13:                 {

  14:                     mStartPage = Locate.ContentRepository().Get<StartPageType>(ContentReference.StartPage);

  15:                 }

  16:  

  17:                 return mStartPage;

  18:             }

  19:         }

  20:     }

Now you make sure you inherit the new class in your usercontrols. By doing this you can now start to use the StartPage as strongly typed directly when accessing propertys in your code:

   1: <asp:Literal runat="server" ID="test"></asp:Literal>

   2:  

   3: <EPiServer:Property runat="server" ID="EPiPropertyCtrl"></EPiServer:Property>

   1: test.Text = StartPage.SearchLegend;

   2:  

   3: EPiPropertyCtrl.PageLink = StartPage.PageLink;

   4:  

   5: EPiPropertyCtrl.PropertyName =  StartPage.GetPropertyName(p => p.SearchLegend);

Using the webcontrol will ensure you have the correct attributes when it comes to editing on page in CMS 7.

Might not be the best example but hey it works

Have a nice weekend, I will!!