Upgrade to EPiServer Commerce 7.5 : Part 1– Allow users to drag and drop catalog node and catalog variant on to content areas.

In our company, we are always given the chances to work with latest and up to date technologies, and EPiServer 7.5 Commerce was one of the cool stuff that my team had the opportunity to explore so far. Kudos to EPiServer team to help me create this blog, on this space.  I will try to share all our experiences on upgrading one of our client EPiServer Commerce site from EPiServer 6 R2 on to EPiServer 7.5 , getting used of latest technology on EPiServer 7.5, Asp.net MVC4, html5/css3 .

Would love to hear any feedback and comments that you guys may have, all for the better community and better product for us all .

On this first blog post, I will describe how we managed to allow user to drag and drop any catalog node and catalog content on to the content areas of the page from the catalog manager component. This is just like how you can drop pages on to different content areas. 
Firstly, we will need a base controller for all our partial content :

namespace Niteco.Web.Cms.Controllers 
{ 
    [TemplateDescriptor(TemplateTypeCategory = TemplateTypeCategories.MvcPartialController, Inherited = true,AvailableWithoutTag = false)] 
    public class BasePartialContentController<T> : PartialContentController<T> where T : IContentData 
    { 
    } 
}

In EPiServer 7.5, there is a base partial content controller to help deliver all partial contents to the pages.
Then for each catalog node content that you want to allow to be dropped on to content area, just need to have it inherit from above base controller:

 public class WineCatalogPartialController : BasePartialContentController<WineCatalogNodeContent>
    {
        public override ActionResult Index(WineCatalogNodeContent currentContent)
        {
            var model =  CatalogNodeViewModelHelpers.BuidWineItemListingModel(currentContent);
            return PartialView("WineItemListingView", model);
        }
    }

var entries = wineItemSearchHelper.SearchEntries(catNodeContent.Code, 0, Int32.MaxValue,out totalCount);

The same apply for product variant content when you want to drag drop it to the content area of the page, you will need to inherit from the base partial content controller:

public class WineItemPartialController : BasePartialContentController<WineItemContent>
    {
        public override ActionResult Index(WineItemContent currentContent)
        {
            var model = new WineItemPartialViewModel(currentContent)
            {
                WineItemDetails = WineItemViewModelHelpers.CreateWineItemContentViewModel(currentContent)
            };
            return PartialView("VariantPartials/WineItemFullPartialView", model);
        }

There was one big issue when we were implementing this was that it causing the site to “stack overflow”, and after many hours of digging, we have found the cause. It was because of the following bit of code in our partial view:

<div class="product_selling_info">
    @Html.Action("Index", "AddToCart", new { reference = Model.CatalogContent.ContentLink})
</div>

Somehow, it is causing the page to keep recall the action within the page, we had to change the page to the following , :

<div class="product_selling_info">
     @Html.Action("Index", "AddToCart", new { reference = Model.CatalogContent.ContentLink, controllerType = typeof(AddToCartController).AssemblyQualifiedName })
</div>

This is for the page to understand that the action is belong to another controller, not the current page controller.

That is all. Hopefully this will help you guys in implementing the drag drop catalog contents on the the content area. In the next coming posts, I will continue to provide more knowledge sharing our process to upgrade an ecommerce site to EPiServer 7.5. If you need the detailed source code or any help, please leave a comment below.

Thanks.