Hello Anders

Have you considered an EPiServer intialization module? This should allow you to hook into the LoadedDefaultContent event and set your default properties on your local blocks apppropriately. 

David

Thanks for your answer David. It doesn't solve my problem though. Every page I'm creating has unique property values in their blocks so it's not default values. Or am I misunderstanding you?

Anders

Hello Anders

I assume your values can be worked out programmatically? If so then the following should/could work:

[InitializableModule]
[ModuleDependency(typeof(EPiServer.Web.InitializationModule))]
public class DefaultBlockProperties : IInitializableModule
{
    public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context)
    {
        var contentEvents = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IContentEvents>();
        contentEvents.LoadedDefaultContent += contentEvents_LoadedDefaultContent;
    }

    void contentEvents_LoadedDefaultContent(object sender, ContentEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.Content is YourPageType || e.Content is SomeOtherPageType) //etc
        {
            //Do your work to populate your default property here
        }
    }


    public void Preload(string[] parameters) { }

    public void Uninitialize(InitializationEngine context) { }
}

You can also implement an interface on the page(s) that have the local block to simplify the access to the block if you want to make things more elegant.

An InitModule is not an option since we need to run our service with different parameters and we also don't want it to run on Application_Start. 

According to the following link, what I want to accomplish doesn't seem possible: http://joelabrahamsson.com/working-programmatically-with-local-blocks-in-episerver-7/

Hello Anders

The initialisaton module runs at application start, however the code I supplied sets up a handler to listen out for EPiServer content events, so the code in the contentEvents_LoadedDefaultContent method will ran after a content item has been created.

David

Believe me, this wont work in this specific case :) I don't really have time sitting here describing all the requirements so you just have to take my word for it :) But thank you anyway.

I ended up doing something like this instead:

var newPage = _contentRepository.GetDefault<MyPage>(parent).CreateWritableClone();

newPage.Name = "MyName";
var myBlock = CreateBlock();
newPage.LocalBlock.MainBody = myBlock.MainBody;

_contentRepository.Save(newPage, SaveAction.Publish, AccessLevel.NoAccess);

private MyBlock CreateBlock()
{
    var block = new MyBlock();
    block.MainBody = new XhtmlString("MyMainBody");
    return block;
}

The number of code lines in my class increased quite a lot but atleast I still can use external methods for creating the different blocks.