Stefan Forsberg
Apr 25, 2009
  5604
(0 votes)

Page Provider – Part one

A task that that keeps appearing more and more is the case of integrating information from some other data source into EpiServer. One way to solve this is to mirror the content and create corresponding Epi-pages programmatically but this clearly violates the DRY principle. Another approach is to write custom logic for the furl handling to be able to present your data that way. This is quite a nice solution in some cases but it’s for example hard to use built in episerver controls like the page list in this scenario. Ted made an excellent blog post about this here.

Another solution that’s available in CMS R2 (running on an enterprise license) is to create a page provider. Page Providers gives you a way of letting EpiServer treat your custom data as though they were normal episerver pages. During the course of the next few posts I'll create a page provider that's used to present a product catalogue.

 

The database

The company we're creating the site for already has a database with all their product data so that should be the base of all the product information.

db

Luckily enough for us the company has both an integer based ID as well as an Guid for each of the categories which will make creating the page provider a bit easier. You might suspect that I designed the database this way for this example because I’m slightly lazy… and that’s a 100% correct assumption. Why this makes our lives easier will be explained in a later post.

Apr 25, 2009

Comments

Sep 21, 2010 10:32 AM

Looking forward to your upcoming posts!

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Recraft's image generation with AI-Assistant for Optimizely

Recraft V3 model is outperforming all other models in the image generation space and we are happy to share: Recraft's new model is now available fo...

Luc Gosso (MVP) | Nov 8, 2024 | Syndicated blog

ExcludeDeleted(): Prevent Trashed Content from Appearing in Search Results

Introduction In Optimizely CMS, content that is moved to the trash can still appear in search results if it’s not explicitly excluded using the...

Ashish Rasal | Nov 7, 2024

CMS + CMP + Graph integration

We have just released a new package https://nuget.optimizely.com/package/?id=EPiServer.Cms.WelcomeIntegration.Graph which changes the way CMS fetch...

Bartosz Sekula | Nov 5, 2024

Block type selection doesn't work

Imagine you're trying to create a new block in a specific content area. You click the "Create" link, expecting to see a CMS modal with a list of...

Damian Smutek | Nov 4, 2024 | Syndicated blog

.NET 8 FAQ

I have previously written about .NET compatibility in general and .NET 8 in particular, see blog posts here , here and here . With the end of suppo...

Magnus Rahl | Nov 4, 2024

Dynamic packages in Commerce Connect

In Optimizely Commerce Connect, you can group different items using packages and bundles. Package: A package has one or more versions of a product...

K Khan | Nov 1, 2024