Common properties amongst the pages

Instead of using a lot of dynamic properties one can create a special settings page. On this page all site-wide settings are saved all together. Then you make only the name of this page to be a dynamic property (ref. to http://www.meadow.se/wordpress/?cat=12). This is a common solution. However, code in the code-behind files becomes a little more complicated if you want to retrieve the settings from the settings page.

For example:

PropertyCriteriaCollection

        propertyCriteriaCollection = new PropertyCriteriaCollection();

PropertyCriteria criteria = new PropertyCriteria();

criteria.Condition = CompareCondition.Equal;

criteria.Name = "PageTypeID";

criteria.Type = PropertyDataType.PageType;

criteria.Value = PageType.Load("SettingsPage").ID.ToString();

criteria.Required = true;

propertyCriteriaCollection.Add(criteria);

PageDataCollection pageDataCollection

                = DataFactory.Instance.FindPagesWithCriteria

                    (PageReference.RootPage, propertyCriteriaCollection);

if (pageDataCollection == null || pageDataCollection.Count == 0)

                return;

                      

if (pageDataCollection[0]["SomeProperty"] != null)

                TextBox1.Text =

                       pageDataCollection[0] ["SomeProperty"].ToString();

 

You see how many actions should be performed with a single aim – to get the SettingsPage’s SomeProperty value. Evidently it’s tiresome and error prone.

Instead you can force the page to load properties values from some other page. For this just open the Shortcut/External Link tab in edit mode, assign  “Fetch data from page in EPiServer CMS” to Link type , and choose the page the properties are loaded from (f.e. SettingsPage):

From this time you can apply to SettingsPage as if they belonged to the w1ef page:

string someProperty = CurrentPage["SomeProperty"] as string;

or:

<EPiServer:Property PropertyName="SomeProperty" runat="server" />