Per Magne Skuseth
Apr 21, 2017
  14051
(16 votes)

Introducing Content Inspector

The Content Inspector is an open source addon for Episerver which helps you get a better overview and improved navigation of complex content structures, such as nested blocks.

Once installed, it will add a new menu item to the content area dropdown menu, which lets you "inspect" the selected content, showing property values. This includes content areas, which means that nested content (blocks in blocks) can be viewed and navigatd with ease. This is demonstrated in the GIF below with a "carousel block" which contains sub blocks.

Image inspector.gif


Name, type, publish status and content area property values are displayed by default in the content inspector view. To display additional properties, use the Inspectable attribute on properties:

[Display(Name = "Carousel image")]
[Inspectable]
public virtual ContentReference CarouselImage { get; set; }

[Inspectable]
public virtual string ImageDescription { get; set; }

[Inspectable]
public virtual string Heading { get; set; }

This can be particularly useful for blocks that contains images:

Image inspect_with_props.png


There is also an option to inspect the entire current content, and not just a single content area item.

Image inspect_current_content.png

By clicking Inspect current content, every content area item will be listed, as well as any properties marked as inspectable.

Image inspect_personalized_and_forms.png

Any kind of IContent can be listed, whether it is pages, blocks, forms, media or commerce content. As shown in the image above, visitor groups are also displayed.

I originally made the addon for Varner Retail, who came up with the idea. When I asked if I could share it as open source, the answer I got was "The Episerver community has given us so much. I don't see why we shouldn't give something back". Thanks, Varner!

Compatible with Episerver 9 & 10.

Git | Nuget

Apr 21, 2017

Comments

Henrik Fransas
Henrik Fransas Apr 21, 2017 12:28 PM

Nice work as always!!!

Thanks!

David Elias
David Elias Feb 2, 2018 10:00 PM

Curious if you will be making changes to the NuGet Package to support CMS 11.

Rajaa Goldman
Rajaa Goldman Apr 10, 2018 01:51 PM

Hello,

 I installed the addOn just now, and used it, it´s very good. It would be even better if it could even show the Content-ID aswell:-) would it be possible to uppdate the addOn with the new inspection (For ID)?

BR, Rajaa Goldman

Per Magne Skuseth
Per Magne Skuseth Apr 10, 2018 03:37 PM

If you need to display the Content ID you can use the Inspectable attribute. Something like this should work:

 [Inspectable]
 public int ContentId => this.ContentLink.ID;

Kanika Arora
Kanika Arora Oct 22, 2018 11:19 PM

Hi,

I'm curious too if the package would be upgraded to support for CMS version 11 and later?

The github source code link gives 404 error - https://github.com/EPiCode/ContentInspector 

stgr
stgr Nov 9, 2018 08:22 AM

The correct URL is https://github.com/BVNetwork/ContentInspector

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