Dojo widgets outside the shell - is this a bad idea?

Matti Virkkunen

Vote:

Hi.

I needed to run some Dojo widgets on a completely separate .aspx page (Web Forms. Ick.) which is not an EPiServer-specific module nor inside the shell and after quite a bit of time I managed to do it. After a significant chunk of setup, things such as content selectors and the WYSIWYG editor run happily on a stand-alone .aspx page.

Is this an extremely bad idea? I tested this on 7.5 and 7.6 and it seems to work. I don't need to support earlier versions because the main reason I did this was to replace the old file chooser dialog which I was using and which is now gone.

How likely do you think is this to be completely broken by the next update? It's kind of hard to tell which things are supposed to be internal and subject to change as the JavaScript library documentation is, to say the least, sparse.

Here's a "concise" version of what I did exactly. About half of it is the required setup and the rest is a simple example with a couple of widgets. It should work if copy-pasted into an .aspx file on an EPiServer >=7.5 site. You need to be logged in as an editor.

https://gist.github.com/mvirkkunen/10484486

#85047

Apr 11, 2014 19:03

Ha Bui

Vote:

Good idea and quite deep knowledge about CMS!

Have a comment about UI, if you put shell core style then your style is nicer!

<%= Page.ClientResources("ShellCore", new [] { ClientResourceType.Style  }) %>

and if you change to load "CMS" and "Shell" only I think is better:

var moduleList = modules.GetModules().Where(m => new string[] { "CMS", "Shell" }.Contains(m.Name))

Ha Bui

#85062

Edited, Apr 14, 2014 6:22

Matti Virkkunen

Vote:

Loading the ShellCore styles indeed fixes a couple of UI glitches I couldn't quite figure out.

Limiting the module list doesn't seem to limit the number of modules that are actually loaded (it was only loading CMS and Shell in the first place) but it does make the JSON structure on the page slightly smaller which is a good thing.

Thanks!

#85145

Apr 16, 2014 11:03

Ilias Kontodimas

Vote:

Hi Matti,

Thank you for your example. This is exactly what I need to show an image selector in my .aspx page.

In my case, I have a TinyMCE editor in the same .aspx page. Is it possible to run outside the shell a TinyMCE editor like in your code? Do you have an example how could I achieve that?

Thank you.

#120924

Apr 28, 2015 10:20