Skip to main content

Passing PageUri to a DCP for Dynamic Linking


We should all know by now that passing an empty (aka Null TcmUri) as PageUri when resolving a Component Link is very bad practice. The reason -- this kind of link resolving is not cached. So, in case you are using a Content Delivery DB, you will make a trip to the DB for every single Component Link resolving.

I have written an older article available here on SDLTridionWorld, about solving these issues, but that's about old school templating. This post presents the mechanism to use when writing Compound Templates.

So, I have a DWT TBB that generates some output for an RTF field. Something like @@Component.Fields.Paragraph@@. I have some ComponentLinks in the RTF field.

The templates runs on a DCP and it generates a TCDL link like this:
<tcdl:Link type="Component" origin="tcm:0-0-0" destination="tcm:37-968" templateURI="tcm:0-0-0" linkAttributes="" textOnFail="true" addAnchor="false" variantId="">Read more</tcdl:Link>.

The problem is the origin is tcm:0-0-0. I want to have my own value/variable here. In JSP, I can use a JSTL variable like this:
<tridion:ComponentLink pageURI="${PageUri}" componentURI="tcm:37-969" templateURI="tcm:0-0-0" addAnchor="false" linkText="Read more" linkAttributes="" textOnFail="true"/>

Where ${PageUri} is some JSTL variable set with the following code in the ‘calling’ JSP:
<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<c:set var="PageUri" value="tcm:37-986-64" scope="request"/>

But anyway, the problem for me is how to get that PageURI attribute (or origin) assigned to my actual value?

The solution I used in this case is the following:
  • C# TBB that parses the <tcdl:Link origin="tcm:0-0-0"… and replaces the NullUri with ${PageUri}
    • Only does that for ‘Publish’, not for preview;
  • Add this TBB at the bottom of the Dynamic CT (after DefaultFinishActions, or after LinkResolver);
Code sample:

private static Regex ComponentLinkRegex = new Regex(@"<tcdl:Link type=""Component"" origin=""tcm:0-0-0""");

public void Transform(Engine engine, Package package)
{
    if (!engine.RenderMode.Equals(RenderMode.Publish))
    {
        Logger.Debug("Render mode not Publish. Do not perform any replacements");
        return;
    }

    Item OutputItem = package.GetByName(Package.OutputName);
    String OutputText = OutputItem.GetAsString();

    // Component Links with null origin
    Match match = ComponentLinkRegex.Match(OutputText);
    while (match.Success)
    {
        String ReplaceLink = match.Value.Replace("tcm:0-0-0", inputParam);
        // inputParam is the value to replace with. e.g. "${PageUri}"
        OutputText = OutputText.Replace(match.Value, ReplaceLink);
        match = match.NextMatch();
    }

    OutputItem.SetAsString(OutputText);
}



Comments

Nuno said…
Awesome, I needed this code just now. :)

Popular posts from this blog

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as...

Toolkit - Performance

This post if part of a series about the File System Toolkit  - a custom content delivery API for SDL Tridion. This post presents performance data that was captured for each major functionality with and without caching Linking, CP Assembler, Component Presentation Factory, Dynamic Content Queries, Model Factory. The data was captured on a 2014 Macbook Pro 15", 16 GB RAM, 2.6 GHz Intel Core i7 running OS X El Capitan. Test methodology: each test was run for 3 minutes and the total number of successful Toolkit API calls was measured. Then the number of calls per second was computed 'with cache' and 'without cache' test runs. Then a cache boost factor was calculated by diving (the number of API calls with cache) / (number of API calls without cache). Each cache test was executed 3 times, with different cache time-to-live values of 1 second, 5 seconds and 0 seconds (eternal cache, no expiration). The rationale is to see what impact different cache expiration/evi...

REL Standard Tag Library

The RSTL is a library of REL tags providing standard functionality such as iterating collections, conditionals, imports, assignments, XML XSLT transformations, formatting dates, etc. RSTL distributable is available on my Google Code page under  REL Standard Tag Library . Always use the latest JAR . This post describes each RSTL tag in the library explaining its functionality, attributes and providing examples. For understanding the way expressions are evaluated, please read my post about the  Expression Language used by REL Standard Tag Library . <c:choose> / <c:when> / <c:otherwise> Syntax:     <c:choose>         <c:when test="expr1">             Do something         </c:when>         <c:when test="expr2">             Do something else         </c:when...