Mark van Aalst » Mark

Using JQuery in custom fields

Mark — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:27:38 +0000

At the moment I’m creating a custom field for tagging content items. I prototyped my custom field in html using JQuery. But when I wanted to convert this to the actual custom field I ran into a problem. As you might know Sitecore uses the Prototype library for all of it’s javascript. And prototype uses the same dollar sign for all of its functions and variables as JQuery does. But JQuery provides a noConflict function where you can reassign the default $.

But then came the next challenge. I needed to use the noConflict function before all other javascript was called. Luckally I remembered that I have seen it before in other custom fields that are on the Shared Source environment. So I started browsing the source code of Alexey Rusakov’s project (Sitecore Fieldtypes) and I found the InjectScripts class which provides an option to add HTML to the section of the Content Editor. There I just added a reference to my JQuery library and off course calling the .noConflict funtion.


namespace Sitecore.SharedSource.Taxonomy
{
class AddScripts
{
public void Process(PipelineArgs args)
{
if (Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.IsEvent)
return;

HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;
if (context == null)
return;

Page page = context.Handler as Page;
if (page == null)
return;

Assert.IsNotNull(page.Header, "Content Editor  tag is missing runat='value'");

string[] scripts = new[]
{
"/sitecore modules/Shell/Taxonomy/jquery-1.4.1.min.js"
};

foreach (string script in scripts)
{
page.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("".FormatWith(script)));
page.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(""));
}
}

}
}

So now I can call my JQuery by using “jQuery” in stead of “$” and the field works.

In my opinion this is just an example of how the Shared Source environment can help you. So if you have created a module, field or any thing else please put it on the Shared Source environment so others can benefit from it.

Restricting FieldEditor to specific template based items

Mark — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:28:04 +0000

In Sitecore 6.2 it is possible to integrate FieldEditors. These are command which enables users edit item settings when they work in the page editor. Personally I think it is a great option when you want editors to only work within the Page Editor, and still let them edit settings.
For the blog module that I created I implemented two FieldEditorCommands which let the user edit the blog and entry settings. When you use the default implementation as described in one of the cookbooks users can always click on the ribbon button regarding if the fields are on the currentitem. When those field don not exist on that item, they just get a empty popup.
I decided to restrict the option only to items which are based on a certain template. You can do this the following way:
You’ll need to override the Execute method in the your class (which overrides from Sitecore.Shell.Applications.WebEdit.Commands.FieldEditorCommand).

Then you isolate the function Context.ClientPage.Start in for instance an if statement.

Example:

if (context.Items[0].TemplateID == new ID(Settings.Default.EntryTemplateID))
{
Context.ClientPage.Start(this, "StartFieldEditor", args);
}
else
{
Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Alert("Please select an entry first");
}

If anyone else has a better way to get the same results please let me know.

Blog module update

Mark — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:08:57 +0000

This week I released the stable version of the EviBlog module. You can download the module from the Sitecore Shared Source. The module works on all Sitecore solutions based on version 6.2.

The module now includes the following features:

Inline Editing support
Windows Live Writer integration
Pingback
RSS (using the Sitecore 6.2 Integrated RSS)
Tagging and tagcloud
Categories
Comments (you can disable per setting)
FieldEditors for blog and entry settings
Custom webcontrols for integrating your own theme

The Shared Source coordinator Jimmie Overby created two video’s (1, 2) which shows you the most common use of the module. Currently I am writing some documentation about how to use the webcontrols in your own theme. With these webcontrols it’s quite easy to integrate the module within an existing Sitecore installation.

Please do not hesitate to use the Shared Source forum when you have questions about the module.

New Sitecore 6 blog module released

Mark — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:08:38 +0000

In the last couple of months I have been working on a new blog module for Sitecore 6.2. It started as a small module just for my own educational purpose but ended up as one of the largest modules I created. The module is a complete rewritten blog module, based upon the functionality of the old 5.3 version. The new version supports inline editing, fieldeditors, webcontrols for custom themes and Windows Live Writer integration. This release includes two sample blogs. One with a standard theme and one custom theme which shows you how to use the custom webcontrols.

List of features

Windows Live Writer integration (MetaWeblog API)
Full frontend (inline) editing
Webedit ribbon (with fieldeditors)
CSS based themes
Custom themes possible (one demo included)
Custom webcontrols (with inline editing)
Comments
Tagging and a tagcloud
RSS Feeds

At this moment the module in still in betá, and I would like to hear your feedback. You can use the comments or just send me a email (mark at evident.nl). When you encounter problems, found a bug or have any other kind of feedback please let me know and I will try to reply as soon as possible.

You can find the installation package and sources on the Shared Source environment.

Sitecore released version 6.2!

Mark — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:11:33 +0000

Today Sitecore released version 6.2. According to the change log their are several new (cool) features.

Sitecore client RSS feeds for items in workflows
Built-in support for syndicating items using the RSS format.
WebDAV support in the media library
A new File Drop Area field type has been introduced
A new Word Field has been introduced!
Analytics Oracle support
Improved IIS7 support
Sitecore’s theme icons are now stored in zip-files.
Sitecore is now distributed with a number of icons that are having a Windows 7-look instead of an XP-look.

Besides that their are many improvements and fixes.

Go check it out! I’m installing it right now and gonna have a a look.

Sitecore roadmap

Mark — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:42:58 +0000

Tonight I was catching up with some RSS Feeds and Twitter messages, when I noticed that SPN (Sitecore Partner Network) is renewed. My compliments to the people behind the renewal, it looks so much better and it’s easier to find the information you’re looking for. Next one is SDN perhaps? I know I would appreciate it, and I think there are more people who would like it.

When I was crawling through the content of SPN I saw the roadmap. Curious as I am I opened it to see if it was a different version than the the outdated one at the old SPN. I then saw that I it’s updated and has some real nice improvements.

Here are some

Sitecore Client RSS feeds
WebDav
MS Word Fieldtype
Webforms 2.0
LINQ data abstraction
Re-factored publishing engine
Advanced clustering of any number of Production CMS Servers

Take a look at the roadmap, you will find more information there.

Creating a Item Editor

Mark — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:55:03 +0000

For a blog module that I am developing I wanted to create an custom item editor. As you might know those are the “tabs” in the Content Editor.

1. Create a aspx file for the item editor user interface.
2. Select the core database in the desktop mode
3. Open the Content Editor and go to the following path /Sitecore/Content/Applications/Content Editor/Editors/Items.
4. You can create an item editor using the /Sitecore Client/Content Editor/Editor data template.
5. You can give your item editor a name using the header field in the data section.
6. In the icon field you can enter a path to the icon.
7. In the url field you need to fill in the url to the aspx file created in step 1
8. Save the item.
9. Switch back to the master database.

Now we have created the item and the user-interface for the Item Editor. The next step is to assign the item editor to a template.

10. You can do this by setting it on the standard values or a individual item. Open the item in the content editor or template manager.
11 . Click on the configure tab, go to the appearance group and click the editor command. A dialog will appear.
12. In this dialog you can select the item editor you want to use, using the arrows you can sort.
13. Finally close the dialog and save and publish.

Now when you select a item based on this template you see a item editor in the content editor with the title you filled in. You can edit the item editor using normal ASP.Net controls. This is a great solution for creating custom reports. But when you want to create an real custom editor functionality, you would like to use the default save button of the content editor. I might be confusing for a end-user to have two save button in one screen.

Unfortunately, Sitecore provides no default solution for capturing that event. Thanks to Eugene Omelnitsky from Sitecore Support (for pointing me in the right direction) I found a solution. You can adapt to the Save event using javascript. I then used JQuery to do an ajax call to the server and execute my save method.

This is the Javascript function which captures the save event and triggers an ajax call to my page method.

And this is the method that I use server side

[System.Web.Services.WebMethod]
public static void SaveItem(string entryid, string introduction, string content, string title)
{
Database master = Factory.GetDatabase("master");

Item currentItem = ItemManager.GetItem(new ID(entryid), Sitecore.Context.Language, Sitecore.Data.Version.Latest, master);
Entry currentEntry = new Entry(currentItem);

currentEntry.BeginEdit();
currentEntry.Title = title;
currentEntry.Introduction = introduction;
currentEntry.Text = content;
currentEntry.EndEdit();
}

The code above is not perfect, it needs a bit more flexibility but for testing purposes it works.

New search for SDN

Mark — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:47:02 +0000

I just noticed that Sitecore has greatly improved their search on SDN. You can now search through SDN, the shared source and Sitecore blogs.You even can filter your results by sdn sections, collections and datatypes.

Only minor is that I can’t find a list of blogs they included in the search, so for that I will use my own search.

Embedding video in Sitecore items

Mark — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:26:33 +0000

These days streaming video on the web is quite popular. In almost every project we do at Evident Interactive the customer wants to embed video in content items. Off course they can do that by copy-pasting the embedding code in a Sitecore field or in the rich-text editor. But that is not the most user-friendly method. I thought it would be nice if an end-user could just copy-paste the url of the page and let an custom control do the rest. So I created a custom field, webcontrol, some xsl extensions an a addition to the flashmanager. Let’s say that we want to embed this video from YouTube. I go to the content editor and paste the url in a field of the type “Video Embed”.

When I want to double check if I pasted the correct url I can click preview. A popup appears with the embedded video.

Then I can save my item and publish it to the web database. The only thing saved in Sitecore is the url to the page containing the video.

But sometimes you want to embed video in to an rich text field. For this I wrote an extension for the flashmanager. It works the same as the custom field, the only thing different is you get a preview inside the tab and the embed code will be copied to to rich-text editor value.

To show my video in the frontend of the site I need to add an custom control to my layout or sublayout. The custom control is included in the package.

You need to add a page directive to your layout or sublayout

<%@ Register TagPrefix="video" Namespace="Sitecore.SharedSource.VideoEmbed" Assembly="VideoEmbed" %>

Then you can add the custom control. You can set the height and width of the embed code. When those are left blank a default size of 240 for the height and 320 for the width will be used.

And here is the result of the control

At the moment the solution works for YouTube, Vimeo and Google Video (international and dutch version). I will contribute this to the Shared Source section of Sitecore as soon as Jimmie is back from holiday and can give me access.

A fresh start

Mark — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:24:25 +0000

Last week I took a look at my blog and realized that I haven’t posted anything the last few months. I just couldn’t find the time to write anything. It has been quite a busy last half year filled with a project at work which required all my time, some personal issues and at last I was involved in a car accident two months ago. By now I am recovering from the accident and slowly resumed my work at Evident.

So last week I updated my blog, installed a new theme and wrote some draft posts. I’m hoping to blog a few times in a month on all kinds of Sitecore stuff.

The word is out

Mark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 23:57:58 +0000

As you might have noticed Sitecore announced the list of this years MVP’s. And I am proud to say that I am one of the thirteen MVP’s worldwide.

I would like to congratulate Alistair Deneys, Christopher Wojciech, Julius Ganns, Justin Sjouw, Klaus Petersen, Mark Cassidy, Thomas Eldblom, Eric Briand, Andy Uzick, Glen McInnis, Alexander Pfandt and Ben Golden for also becoming an Sitecore MVP.

Custom search for Sitecore blogs

Mark — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 23:52:52 +0000

Whenever I use Google to search for Sitecore information I get a lot of marketing and CMS review results and a few results with detailed developer information. So I created a Google custom search engine to search through all Sitecore related blogs. Now I can search through sites I think are the most usefull for me as an developer.

I use it a lot and thought I might be usefull to share this the rest of the community. So I created a little ASP.Net application around it which makes use of the Google Custom Search API. Now it is possible for everyone to submit an url of which they think it’s usefull. I allready included all blogs which are used in the Yahoo Pipe. I hope that this search engine will be very usefull for everyone. I am planning on creating an search provider for both Internet Explorer and Firefox in the near future.

You can find the custom search engine at: http://www.sitecoreblogsearch.com

And off course you can use the comments to let me know what you think of the custom search.

Using fieldcontrols in a ListView

Mark — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 07:38:45 +0000

When you want to use a fieldcontrol like a Text, Link or Image control in a ListView you need to specify a datasource. By not specifying a datasource Sitecore looks at the current item. Which in a ListView is not the right one. So you need so set the datasource in code-behind or use an Eval expression in code-before.

When you want you use the code-behind option you need to raise an eventhandler which triggers the ItemDataBound handler.In that event you want to get the values of the current item. So you need to cast the ListViewDataItem to an Sitecore item.

For instance:

Code-before









Read more...

Code-behind

ListView1.DataSource = BlogManager.GetAllBlogPosts(Sitecore.Context.Item.ID);
ListView1.ItemDataBound += new EventHandler(ListView1_ItemDataBound);
ListView1.DataBind();

The datasource of the ListView is a generic list of items (In this case that will be all children matching a specific templateid). Then create an new EventHandler to bind the controls in the ItemTemplate to the current item.

void ListView1_ItemDataBound(object sender, ListViewItemEventArgs e)
{

Item objEntry = (Item)((ListViewDataItem)e.Item).DataItem;

Text txt = (Text)e.Item.FindControl("Text1");
txt.DataSource = objEntry.ID.ToString();
}

Instead of the above way I could also use an Eval in the code-before, but then I’m going to use C# in a way I don’t want to.
For example:

So why would I use this “hard” way, instead I could just create the controls in C#. Well when I am working on a Sitecore project, usually I do all .Net stuff and a frontend developer creates the html and css. So when he wants to edit the html structure it is still possible for him, and there is no need for him to look in the code-behind file.

Maximum number of Sitecore query items

Mark — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:47:16 +0000

Last week I had some problems with an Sitecore Query. It didn’t show more than an fixed number of items. After some hard thinking I rembered that there is a web.config key called Query.MaxItem which, you might guessed it, controls the maximum number of results of an Sitecore Query.

Using profile with the Rich Text Editor

Mark — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:36:39 +0000

Regularly I see topics on the SDN5 forums where people ask if it is possible to use a custom Rich Text editor. Wll, yes it is. You can use so called profiles with the Rich Text editor. These profiles are stored in the Core database under /sitecore/system/Settings/Html Editor Profiles/. There are some default pre-configurated profile which you van duplicate and customize to your own needs.

To use these profile you need to set the source value of an rich text field in your template.

Disable Sitecore publishing

Mark — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:49:45 +0000

To avoid problems during the development of an Sitecore site it could be useful to disable the Sitecore Publishing method.

This can be done by editing the following web.config rule:

These are the settings of your current site. The database key contains the database name from where the site needs to get its content. By setting this to the master database you do not need to publish your content anymore.

Sitecore 6 released

Mark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:08:01 +0000

Yesterday the people at Sitecore released the new version of their CMS. Sitecore 6 (previously called “Crestone”) has lots of improvements for either the end user as for dsevelopers.

A few improvements are:

Inline editing for editors
.Net 2.0 Memebership support
New and faster Content Editor
New data types
The new Page editor

and much, much more.

For a complete list the documentation team has released an “What’s New” document. You can find it on SDN5 here

More information involving enhancements can be find at the documentation are of SDN5.

Copy & Paste Layout Settings

Mark — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:55:44 +0000

While developing a Sitecore website there are lots of situations where you want multiple items to have the same Presentation Settings (renderings/sublayouts/layout). The ideal case is that your item Masters have these settings included but sometimes this isn’t the case.

You can copy and paste the settings all at one time this way:

1. Navigate to the source item in the Content Editor (or Template Manager)

2. On the ‘View’ Ribbon (Menu tab on top of the screen) select Standard Fields and Raw Values

3. Copy the (raw) Renderings field value (in the layout section of the content of the item)

4. Paste it into the destination item Renderings Field.

5. Disable Raw values and standard fields if necessary.

There also is a (unsupported) Sitecore Module for this action. Check it out Layout copy pastehere.

Sitecore Validation Rules

Mark — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:53:19 +0000

In Sitecore you can use validation rules. By default there are three validations rules on each template:

Is Integer
Max Length 40
Requirer

You can modify or add new rules in the sitecore\system\settings\validation\field section in the content editor

With the use of an multilist you can set the rules for your template.

ATTENTION: Validation rules are already built in for version 5.3.1 but you can’t use them. Therefore you need to upgrade to version 5.3.2, which costs about an our. You can use regular expressions in version 5.3.1

Rich Text Editor

Mark — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:50:02 +0000

One of the most annoying things about Sitecore is that the Rich Text Editor needs to be opent in an seperate web page dialog.

But you can customize this behavior!

Go to the Control Panel > Preferences > Change Your Application Options
Tab Rich Text Editor
Select editable

You see that the Content Editor got expanded with the tab “Rich Text”

Dynamic load where parameters for linqDatasource

Mark — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:39:27 +0000

When using an Linq Datasource (linq to sql) for a datagrid (Gridview, ListView, etc) you don’t always want all rows from a table. To exclute data you can use the WhereParameters to add an where statement to your DataSource.

You can do limited where statements with the Visual Studio Wizards. When you need more than a limited statement you can dynamicly create an Parameter to add to your Linq DataSource.

The following examples shows how to filter the Linq Datasource that recovers all rows from the Post table and filters them on the BlogId. The BlogManager.CurrentBlogId gets the blog GUID from the Session.

[code:c#]
   Parameter whereparam = new Parameter();
   whereparam.Name = "BlogId";
   whereparam.DefaultValue = BlogManager.CurrentBlogId.ToString();
   whereparam.Type = TypeCode.Object;
   linqDataSource.WhereParameters.Add(whereparam);
   linqDataSource.Where = "BlogId == Guid(@BlogId)";
[/code]

You convert the @BlogId (string) to a Guid In the linqDataSource.Where property otherwise you get the following error:

Operator ‘==’ incompatible with operand types ‘Guid’ and ‘String’

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.Query.Dynamic.ParseException: Operator ‘==’ incompatible with operand types ‘Guid’ and ‘String’