Dynamic Data Store : Easier Store Creation and Remapping (for CMS 6 R2)

We have received lots of good feedback about the Dynamic Data Store (DDS) since it’s launch with CMS 6 R1. However, one area that has caused a few problems and quite rightly a little criticism is the way to create / obtain and most critically, how to remap stores when you change your class definition (especially when they change often in the development phase).

With that said, there are some major improvements in this area in the upcoming R2 Wave release (CMS 6 R2, Community 4 R2 etc.)

EPiServerDataStoreAttribute

This is an existing attribute that could be applied to classes to tell the DDS the name of the store to save an instance of the class to when saved as part of an object graph. We have added a couple of new properties to this class.

AutomaticallyCreateStore

Setting this new boolean property to true means that you no longer need to worry if your store exists or not, it will be created on demand when GetStore is called!

AutomaticallyRemapStore

Setting this new boolean property to true means that you no longer need to worry if you change your class definition, the store’s definition will be automatically remapped to the class on demand when GetStore or CreateStore is called!

EPiServerDataPropertyRenameAttribute

This new attribute is used in combination with the AutomaticallyRemapStore property of the EPiServerDataStoreAttribute. Because the DDS uses reflection to discover what properties a class has, it cannot distinguish between renaming a property or removing a property and then adding a new one with a different name. For that reason, you should apply this attribute to a property when it’s name is changed to enable the property to be mapped to the existing values in the big table. Under the development phase, you may choose to skip this if it’s not important for your class to work with existing data is the class’ store.

An example of using the new functionality can be found here on the Code section of EPiServer World.

For existing development on CMS 6 R1 (and Community 4 R1), I will shortly be releasing an open source variant of the above which will give pretty much the same functionality. Watch this space!