It?s been a while since I had a chance to do any coding… turns out leading a development division tends to not have much to do with development? who knew?!
But I?ve finally got a moment to sit down and refresh the EPiServer PowerShell console and make it compatible with both CMS versions 5 & 6. You could technically use it before on CMS 6 but the looks of it was broken. (previous version available here)
What triggered it was a talk with Michael Sadler earlier this week. Michael is a technical consultant by day (and a musician by night) in our solutions team in London. We talked how he was doing a content audit for a client in one of the other CMS?es we?re supporting. Which really sounded like a daunting task? The content got exported as XML and then he had to write a bunch of C# code to parse it and create statistics for e.g. how many people edit the content, who created the majority of the content etc? well I couldn?t resist but to brag?
looks through all the pages, and counts how many articles by each author there are in the CMS. Naturally you can also do it on a sub-branch of content as well.
I?m sorry Michael you had to go through this without PowerShell?
Deployment
The plugin will detect the version of EPiServer it?s running under and will skin itself appropriately to match the CMS style.
As far as I can tell, your PowerShell scripts will be interchangeable between the versions, as far as they themselves don?t touch any API that?s undergone a breaking change.
It?s been a while since I had a chance to do any coding… turns out leading a development division tends to not have much to do with development? who knew?!
But I?ve finally got a moment to sit down and refresh the EPiServer PowerShell console and make it compatible with both CMS versions 5 & 6. You could technically use it before on CMS 6 but the looks of it was broken. (previous version available here)
What triggered it was a talk with Michael Sadler earlier this week. Michael is a technical consultant by day (and a musician by night) in our solutions team in London. We talked how he was doing a content audit for a client in one of the other CMS?es we?re supporting. Which really sounded like a daunting task? The content got exported as XML and then he had to write a bunch of C# code to parse it and create statistics for e.g. how many people edit the content, who created the majority of the content etc? well I couldn?t resist but to brag?
looks through all the pages, and counts how many articles by each author there are in the CMS. Naturally you can also do it on a sub-branch of content as well.
I?m sorry Michael you had to go through this without PowerShell?
Deployment
The plugin will detect the version of EPiServer it?s running under and will skin itself appropriately to match the CMS style.
As far as I can tell, your PowerShell scripts will be interchangeable between the versions, as far as they themselves don?t touch any API that?s undergone a breaking change.
December 26th, 2009 by Adam Najmanowicz | 21 Comments
One of the most frequently and eagerly used programming constructs of the Microsoft.Net Framework is Enum. There are several interesting features that make it very compelling to use to for all kinds of dropdowns and checklists:
The bounds factor ? proper use of Enum type guarantee that the selected value will fall within the constraints of the allowed value set.
The ability to treat Enums as flags (and compound them into flag sets) as well as a one-of selector.
The ease of use and potentially complete separation of the ?Enum value? from the underlying machine type representation that ensures the most efficient memory usage.
Surprisingly enough EPiServer as it stands right now does not have an easy facility to turn Enums into properties. To give credit where credit is due, the EPiServer framework provides a nice surrogate that mimic that behaviour to a degree. The relevant property types are:
PropertyAppSettingsMultiple – which ?creates check boxes with options that are defined in the AppSettings section in web.config. The name of the property should match the key for the app setting.?
PropertyAppSettings – which ?creates a drop down list with options that are defined in the AppSettings section in web.config. The name of the property should match the key for the app setting.?
You quickly realize though that the properties have some limitations that makes their use a bit less compelling:
The properties are not strongly typed
The property entry in AppSettings section has to have the name that matches the property name on the page.
It?s rather poorly documented, Other than relating to this blog entry or Erik?s post documenting it I could not find any other examples on how to use them. (but then again, who needs docs really when we have Reflector)
You cannot have the very same property duplicated on the page since you can only have a single property of a given name per page. So you need to have multiple entries in AppSettings that match the name of each of those properties on your pages. I know? semantics but still?
You are working on strings rather than enums (Did i mention it?s not type safe?)
The values in the AppSettings are stored in a somewhat DLS-y manner (consecutive options are separated from each other with the ?|? character, the name and the value are separated with a ?;?, for example: <add key = "RegionId" value="First Option;Option1|Default Option;Option2|Disabled Option;Option3" /> ) and I have had on an occasion entered a string there that caused the server to crash.
The values are not translatable, or at least I could not find how to do it and any Reflector digging rendered no results either.
Last week or so ago a couple of friends in another project in Cognifide has run into a wall while trying to load test their website. the problem was as follows: The website is highly AJAX based â the page merely loads a stub in the initial request but then loads the rest of its data in a dynamic matter therefore a traditional web testing tools are fairly useless. What they tried was to setup a number of Selenium clients to pound the server, but that turned out to be fairly challenging to the machine doing the testing. It was not possible to set up more than 10 clients on a fairly strong machine.
Also there are other limitations like time to wait for the server to timeout and time between clicks, which I am not sure the tool allowed them to adjust. Talking to them I recalled a tool for grabbing website thumbnails long time ago. one way for them would be to to make a batch file with it. The tool would grab the sitesâ thumbnail and stress it, but they would still have to setup a number of clients. Also it creates and tears down an instance of IE every time, making itâs not optimal for that task.
So a couple of evenings later (and a few back-s and forth-s during the testing sessions) out comes SoakIE:
Last week or so ago a couple of friends in another project in Cognifide has run into a wall while trying to load test their website. the problem was as follows: The website is highly AJAX based ? the page merely loads a stub in the initial request but then loads the rest of its data in a dynamic matter therefore a traditional web testing tools are fairly useless. What they tried was to setup a number of Selenium clients to pound the server, but that turned out to be fairly challenging to the machine doing the testing. It was not possible to set up more than 10 clients on a fairly strong machine.
Also there are other limitations like time to wait for the server to timeout and time between clicks, which I am not sure the tool allowed them to adjust. Talking to them I recalled a tool for grabbing website thumbnails long time ago. one way for them would be to to make a batch file with it. The tool would grab the sites? thumbnail and stress it, but they would still have to setup a number of clients. Also it creates and tears down an instance of IE every time, making it?s not optimal for that task.
So a couple of evenings later (and a few back-s and forth-s during the testing sessions) out comes SoakIE:
Last week or so ago a couple of friends in another project in Cognifide has run into a wall while trying to load test their website. the problem was as follows: The website is highly AJAX based ? the page merely loads a stub in the initial request but then loads the rest of its data in a dynamic matter therefore a traditional web testing tools are fairly useless. What they tried was to setup a number of Selenium clients to pound the server, but that turned out to be fairly challenging to the machine doing the testing. It was not possible to set up more than 10 clients on a fairly strong machine.
Also there are other limitations like time to wait for the server to timeout and time between clicks, which I am not sure the tool allowed them to adjust. Talking to them I recalled a tool for grabbing website thumbnails long time ago. one way for them would be to to make a batch file with it. The tool would grab the sites? thumbnail and stress it, but they would still have to setup a number of clients. Also it creates and tears down an instance of IE every time, making it?s not optimal for that task.
So a couple of evenings later (and a few back-s and forth-s during the testing sessions) out comes SoakIE:
Have you ever (or have your customers) created and edited a page in one language only to realize that their selected locale was wrong? Have you ever wished you could delete a master language branch of a page after creating its localized counterpart but you could only delete the newly created slave language instead? Have a customer ever requested that they could copy a whole branch and you convert it to another language so that they could then translate in-place?
Well I have? and I?m sure I will. And so did Fredrikj on the our #epicode IRC channel ;).
Basically I had the tool that would convert from one language to another, but Fredrikj requested something that would switch master language of a page from one to another. Since I?ve already had some of the work done, I?ve updated the stored procedure I?ve written some time ago and slapped a nice GUI up on it. Here?s the result:
What the tool allows you to do is perform either language conversion or master branch switching on a selected page and all of its children (if you choose so).
The stored procedure have been updated to work on CMS5 R2 (will no longer work on R1 ? but if you need that functionality, comment here or give me a shout and I?ll create a compatible version for you).
A word of caution though ? I take no guarantee whatsoever about its operation. Especially, if you wreck your client?s database with it. I did what I could to prevent some of the obvious problems (like switching to a non existing master or converting to an existing one) but I will not be responsible if it won?t work for you. make a database backup and experiment there before you do any changes on the real data. That said ? it works for me, so I think it should also work for you.
You can download the archive containing the tool here. unzip it to your EPiServer web application folder keeping the folder structure or the plugin reference will be wrong. Include the *.aspx and the *.cs files in your project and apply the SQL file to your database (The manipulation is performed by a stored procedure located in the file).
Also if you?re performing the change in a load balanced environment, you may need to restart the other servers once you do the changes. I reset the DataFactory cache, but I am not sure it propagates through to other servers.
January 8th, 2009 by Adam Najmanowicz | 16 Comments
Once you?ll update the framework to the extended one, you will immediately notice that? nothing has changed. Hmm? did something go wrong?
Well, not really. By default the framework will be run in the ?legacy mode?. Thanks to an old article by our own Marek Blotny, I?ve learned how to build Plugin settings which are just perfect for the purpose!
So to configure and enable the new features you need to open your admin UI and in the ?Config? click on the ?Plugin Manager? item and select our framework plugin as shown in the picture
Once youâll update the framework to the extended one, you will immediately notice that⌠nothing has changed. Hmm⌠did something go wrong?
Well, not really. By default the framework will be run in the âlegacy modeâ. Thanks to an old article by our own Marek Blotny, Iâve learned how to build Plugin settings which are just perfect for the purpose!
So to configure and enable the new features you need to open your admin UI and in the âConfigâ click on the âPlugin Managerâ item and select our framework plugin as shown in the picture
January 8th, 2009 by Adam Najmanowicz | 16 Comments
Once you?ll update the framework to the extended one, you will immediately notice that? nothing has changed. Hmm? did something go wrong?
Well, not really. By default the framework will be run in the ?legacy mode?. Thanks to an old article by our own Marek Blotny, I?ve learned how to build Plugin settings which are just perfect for the purpose!
So to configure and enable the new features you need to open your admin UI and in the ?Config? click on the ?Plugin Manager? item and select our framework plugin as shown in the picture
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