How to get the current page's category from a block and use Find to search for all pages that match the category.

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 02:13:19 GMT

In my application I created a block that showed all related pages based on the parent pages category.
To achieve this I created a new category field called Location, the idea behind this field is to only select one location per page hence the call below to get the First() location. You could use .In() if you required to match against multiple.
In the block controllers ActionResult() method I get the parent page object by using the ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IPageRouteHelper>() .
In the search query you can see that I first Filter() on the Location category field and call Match() to get the pages that match the parent page's Location.
I then use Filter() and Match() to exclude the parent page from the results based on the ContentGUID.

Note: The code below has no exception handling for blog readability so this would need to be added in a real world application.

    public class RelatedHomesBlockController : BlockController<RelatedHomesBlock>
    {
        private readonly IPageRouteHelper _pageRouteHelper;
        public IClient FindServiceClient { get; private set; }

        public RelatedHomesBlockController(IClient client)
        {
            FindServiceClient = client;
            _pageRouteHelper = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IPageRouteHelper>();
        }

        public override ActionResult Index(RelatedHomesBlock currentBlock)
        {
            var currentPage = (_pageRouteHelper.Page as AccommodationPage);
            var currentPageCategory = currentPage.Location.First();
            var contentResult = FindServiceClient.Search<AccommodationPage>()
                                .Filter(h => h.Location.Match(currentPageCategory))
                                .Filter(h => !h.ContentGuid.Match(currentPage.ContentGuid))
                                .GetContentResult();
            var model = new RelatedHomesBlockModel
            {
                Heading = currentBlock.Heading,
                ContentResult = contentResult
            };

            return PartialView(model);
        }
    }

Setting up Episerver Find on a development machine using Autofac

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 21:29:39 GMT

Setting up Episerver Find is straight forward but I did run into a few steps that could stump new players.

The first two following steps are well documented so I will not go into them.

Step 1: Create an Episerver Find account online.

Step 2: Add the web config details to your project.

Step 3: Next we add the Autofac dependency Injection code into our Global.asax.cs file, most of the code goes into the Application_Start() method that already exist.
Note: Below I am registering all Controllers in the application using builder.RegisterControllers(typeof(EpiServerApplication).Assembly) so just changed the EpiServerApplication class to match your application.
We then register our search client class and set the dependency resolver using Autofac.
This means we only instantiate the Client class once and then inject it into our controllers, which improves the applications performance.

    public class EPiServerApplication : EPiServer.Global
    {
        protected void Application_Start()
        {
            var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
            builder.RegisterControllers(typeof(EPiServerApplication).Assembly);
            builder.Register(x =>
                CreateSearchClient()).As<IClient>().SingleInstance();
            var container = builder.Build();
            DependencyResolver.SetResolver(
                new AutofacDependencyResolver(container));

            //Standard MVC stuff
            AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
        }

        private static IClient CreateSearchClient()
        {
            var client = Client.CreateFromConfig();
            //Any modifications required goes here    
            return client;
        }
    }

Step 4: On the Episerver Alloy template the code above didnt compile because it was missing some important DLLs, to fix this we now need to add the Autofac.dll and Autofac.Integration.Mvc.dll to our project.

In Visual Studio go to Tools > NuGet Package Manager > Package Manager Console

In the Package Manager Console enter the following:

PM > Install Package Autofac

Then run

PM > Install Package Autofac.Mvc5

The code we entered above will now resolve and you should be able to build your project without errors.

Step 5: Now in a Controller we need to add an IClient property, which as you can see below I called FindServiceClient.
Then add a constructor with the IClient parameter that we are injecting into and set it to the FindServiceClient property.
Now we can write queries against the Find service as follows, this code is from a block controller that returns pages:

    public class TopRatedHomesBlockController : BlockController<TopRatedHomesBlock>
    {
        public IClient FindServiceClient { get; private set; }

        public TopRatedHomesBlockController(IClient client)
        {
            FindServiceClient = client;
        }

        public override ActionResult Index(TopRatedHomesBlock currentBlock)
        {
            var contentResult = FindServiceClient.Search<AccommodationPage>()
                            .Filter(h => h.Rating.GreaterThan(4))
                            .GetContentResult();

            var model = new TopRatedHomesBlockModel
            {
                Heading = currentBlock.Heading,
                ContentResult = contentResult
            };

            return PartialView(model);
        }
    }

Step 6: In the code above I am using an extension method to get PageData, the AccommodationPage class inherits StandardPage which inherits SitePageData which inherits PageData, the extension method used is called GetContentResult() .

To use this extension method we must add the following using to our class:

using EPiServer.Find.Cms;

Completed: That wraps up how to setup the powerful Episerver Find!

Blog posts by Simon J Ovens

How to get the current page's category from a block and use Find to search for all pages that match the category.

Setting up Episerver Find on a development machine using Autofac