Top tip - Auto Suggestion for editors

Auto-suggestion can significantly enhance the efficiency, consistency, and overall quality of content created and managed by editors in a content management system. It serves as a valuable tool that supports editors in maintaining high standards and streamlining their workflow. This small feature can benefit editors in many ways such as saving time by predicting and suggesting words or phrases for some fields as they type. It can promote consistency in writing style and terminology across the content. Editors will adhere to specific style guides or content standards if required for some fields.

Developers can add simple built-in auto-suggestions for editors to select when working in the edit view of Optimizely Content Management System (CMS)

Create a Custom selection class by inheriting ISelectionQuery e.g.

using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Linq;
    using EPiServer.ServiceLocation;
    using EPiServer.Shell.ObjectEditing;
     
      namespace EPiServer.Samples
    {
        [ServiceConfiguration(typeof(ISelectionQuery))]
        public class MySelectionQuery : ISelectionQuery
        {
            SelectItem[] _items;
            public MySelectionQuery()
            {
                _items = new SelectItem[] { 
                    new SelectItem() { Text = String.Empty, Value = String.Empty },
                    new SelectItem() { Text = "Alternative1", Value = "1" },
                    new SelectItem() { Text = "Alternative 2", Value = "2" } };
            }
           //Will be called when the editor types something in the selection editor.
            public IEnumerable<ISelectItem> GetItems(string query)
            {
                return _items.Where(i => i.Text.StartsWith(query, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase));
            }
           //Will be called when initializing an editor with an existing value to get the corresponding text representation.
            public ISelectItem GetItemByValue(string value)
            {
                return _items.FirstOrDefault(i => i.Value.Equals(value));
            }
        }
    }

Add the AutoSuggestionEditor attribute with your properties as below and set the AllowCustomValues property to true so that the editor is not forced to select one of the suggested choices. By default, this property is set to false and the editor must select one of the suggested values.

[AutoSuggestSelection(typeof(MySelectionQuery))]
public virtual string SelectionEditor1 { get; set; }
    
[AutoSuggestSelection(typeof(MySelectionQuery), AllowCustomValues = true)]
public virtual string SelectionEditor2 { get; set; }