Adding custom views to your content

Great!

One view I'd like to have is a more customized version of the "contentlisting" view where I could specify which columns I'd like to be displayed in the table.

Currently (at least last time I checked a couple of weeks ago) the columns were hard coded into the dojo widgets and templates.

Awesome - so this is the equivalent of the old EditPanel GuiPlugin...... Nice to know there are options for extension points to the edit interface beyond building a dojo widget.

This is great. As mark stated. A lot of the old CMS 6 Plugins can be moved to this view.

@Alf: Yes, we considered that when we developed the custom views for Commerce in 7.5. However, there was need to add custom formatters to be able to display user friendly values which complicated things a bit. So we never got to the point of adding the posibility to configure the list. But I hope we can add this in the future with a bunch of formatters to configure)

@Mark/Jakob: Yes, this now makes it possible to port existing pre CMS 7 plug-ins. However, as mentioned in the blog post, one should think once of twice before "dumping" new views unto the editors. I also hope that we can make these views available in different places, for instance like in Duongs original blog post.

Hi

Do you have any example with MVC. Trying to get to my controller but
ContentRouteHelper instance = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance();
returns instance.Content==null, but the querystring is there...

A

Hi Anders!

Your comment has not been forgotten, just that I haven't had time to give you a proper response yet. The short version is that there is no built in support for resolving the content item by the id query string in MVC. This is of course doable but you'd have to extract the content item from the query string in your controller right now. I plan to write some code that does this and post this here when I get time...

Linus,
I'm using a ControllerType = "epi-cms/widget/IFrameController" to display a 'legacy' .aspx page. The page loads fine, but if I click a button on the page, I get an AntiForgeryValidation error, is there a way of switching off the AntiForgery validation for my page in the i-frame, or indeed of supplying the token im my page?

Hi Mark!

Did you inherit from the ContentWebFormsBase as described in this blog post?

http://world.episerver.com/Blogs/Linus-Ekstrom/Dates/2013/12/New-public-APIs/

Linus,
Yes - I've inherited from ContentWebFormsBase.
The button causing the issue is actually an EPiServer ToolButton defined in the EPiServer.UI dll
[Edit] It's actually any postback on the form. I have other 'legacy' forms which work fine, but I can't work out why this one should fail.

Linus, it seems to be a bug, as I can reproduce it on a standard Alloy demo site. I've raised an issue with developer Support for this.

@Mark: Please send in your code with the support case. I tried reproducing this using the ToolButton posting to a simple event handler that just sets the text for a label and I see no problems when pressing the button.

Linus, turned out to be my fault: I'd overridden OnPreRender, but hadn't invoked base.PreRender().
This of course stopped the ContentWebFormsBase class from doing it's stuff.

@Mark: Great that you found the cause!

Hi Linus! Thank you for yet a great post, it was exactly what i was looking for =)
I have a question though, is there a way to access the CurrentPage (of type ProductPage in your example) from the UIDescriptor, say if you wanted to hide the view when a certain property is not set? It feels unnecessary to have the dropdownmenu instead of the button to edit the page when the custom view is not going to be showing any data.

Hi Kenia!

Unfortunately, that is not possible. The reason is that the available views are stored in a settings object when the entire edit view is created and not when each item is loaded. I've noted your request though, if we for some reason should change this in the future.

Thanks for your reply. At least I know I can stop digging!

Hi Linus,

Do you have any example with MVC?

-TDzung

Dont really know why i can see the name in the drop down?

[ServiceConfiguration(typeof(ViewConfiguration))]
public class ObjectImporterViewConfiguration : ViewConfiguration
{
public ObjectImporterViewConfiguration() : base(typeof(ObjectListPageTypeModel))
{
Key = "objectImporter";
Name = "Object_Importer";
Description = "Object Importer Tool";
ControllerType = "epi-cms/widget/IFrameController";
ViewType = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/EpiCustomization/Pages/WebForm.aspx");
IconClass = "epi-iconObjectFolder";
SortOrder = int.MaxValue;
}

Any clue why there is no name showing in the drop down?

Hello,

Regarding the MVC questions, I introduced the following base class whenever I want to use a custom (mvc) view.

    // source: https://world.episerver.com/documentation/developer-guides/CMS/user-interface/views/Creating-a-component-for-a-Web-Form/
    public class CustomIFrameViewPageController<TPageData> : PageController<TPageData> where TPageData : PageData
    {
        protected override void Initialize(RequestContext requestContext)
        {
            base.Initialize(requestContext);

            EnsureNodeDataToken(requestContext);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Ensure proper data token so that default ContentDataModelBinder / ContentDataValueProvider can do the model binding
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="requestContext"></param>
        private void EnsureNodeDataToken(RequestContext requestContext)
        {
            var contentId = requestContext.HttpContext.Request.QueryString["id"];

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(contentId)) throw new Exception("No context (content id in querystring) found on current request.");

            var contentReference = ContentReference.Parse(contentId);
            requestContext.RouteData.DataTokens.Add(RoutingConstants.NodeKey, contentReference);
        }
    }

Usage:

    public class CommentsController : CustomIFrameViewPageController<BlogOverviewPage>
    {
        public ActionResult Index(BlogOverviewPage currentPage)
        {
            // currentPage is available
            return Content("dummy");
        }
    }

The code sets the appropriate datatoken to enable the default epi model binding. It's an initial version so not all scenario's are supported.

It's an older post but maybe it's helpfull to anyone.

bye,

bob