Blog posts by Per Gunsarfs

Developer News in Episerver Commerce presentation at Ascend

Wed, 30 May 2018 11:46:35 GMT

During the Ascend event in Las Vegas, London and Stockholm I held a presentation about news in Episerver Commerce. I talked about new features we have been releasing during 2018 so far, and some things we are currently working on right now.

Executive summary

New features

Access rights for catalog content
Complete order abstractions
Improved tax handling
More performant calculators

In progress

Future: Improvements to order handling

For anyone who attended the talks that want a copy of the slides, you can get them here.

Placeholder text for property editors

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 10:01:53 GMT

Last week I ran into a (slightly hidden) feature in EPiServer that I think could be quite useful in many scenarios. So let's share it!

What I found it that it's possible to add placeholder/watermark text to the property editors. That is accomplished by setting the "Promt" property on the "Display" attribute for the property. So this code:

[Display(Prompt = "Enter title here")]
public virtual string Title { get; set; }

Would generate this:

The caveat to all this is that it will only work for "simple" property editors. I tested it on basic textboxes and date selectors, and it worked great. However, for more complex ones, e.g. a content area editor, the placeholder text will not be shown.

How to set up an empty CMS site with MVC support

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 15:02:54 GMT

I got a question regarding the MVC support in the EPiServer 7 Preview. How would you go about setting up an empty CMS site with MVC support?

If you install a site with the Alloy Tech templates, there is a zip module that adds MVC samples to the site. But what if you want to build MVC templates, but not install the Alloy Tech templates? I.e. have an empty site but with MVC tooling support. Here is what I did in order to get an empty MVC 4 project working with the EPiServer 7 Preview.

1. Install an empty CMS site using EPiServer Deployment Center.

2. Create a new ASP.NET MCP 4 Web Application, and choose the empty template.

3. Copy the content of the folder containing the MVC project, i.e. the folder where the .csproj file resides. Skip the web.config files, global.ascx and global.ascx.cs. Paste the content in the site folder installed in step 1. I.e. the folder containing all the site files.

4. In the parent folder of the MVC files there is a folder called packages. Copy that to the parent folder of the site files. This is needed in order to keep the references in the .csproj file intact.

5. Open the .csproj file and you’ll notice that the files global.ascx.cs, web.debug.config and web.release.config are missing. Just delete those references from the project.

6. Add any needed references to EPiServer assemblies. For a basic MVC template you will at least need EPiServer.dll, EPiServer.Data and EPiServer.BaseLibrary.

The project should now compile and now you can add your page types and templates. After doing so you will want to go to the UI and create a page. But since this an empty site it might not be obvious how to create the first page. Here is a short guide on how you could accomplish that.

1. Set pageStartId = 1 in episerver.config. The root page of the site is now your start page.

2. Go to edit, which can be found at http://{mysite}/{uipath}/modules/cms/home.

3. Create a new page under the root page. This will be your new start page.

4. Set pageStartId = 4(the id of the new page) in episerver.config.

You should now have a fully armed and operational CMS site.