Skip to main content

Referencing Image Variants from Dreamweaver Templates

OK, so you've written your Resize Image TBB that publishes a variant image... But now you need a reference (e.g. the URL) of this variant in DWT. How would I get that?

The first thing I tried, in my DW TBB, was to reference the image variant using the attribute tridion:variantId. How cool it would be that by just referencing the image TcmUri and variantId in DWT to actually have that resolved and replaced by the Resolve Links default TBB. Something like this:

<img src="tcm:1-2" tridion:variantId="thumbnail"/>

Well, it doesn't work! The TBB Resolve Links doesn't know about attribute tridion:variantId on an img element.

So, I told myself "I will write My Own Resolve Links TBB" and I started investigating... What I tried was retrieving the image variant from the package (lookup by name or Tcmuri), then identify the one I needed by matching on the variantId. Well, that doesn't work either! It seems that there is only one MMComponent in the Package, added by the DW TBB and that one does not have a variantId (i.e. this is the original MMComponent). I event iterated over the entire Package hoping to identify the image variant added by RenderedItem.AddBinary() method. It is not in the package! So I could not retrieve it!

Next, I tried adding the image variant to the package and specify the variant myself. I quickly abandoned this approach, simply because I could not find a Package.Create*Item that would allow me to add a MMComponent with a variant. Seemed like a dead-end!

Finally, I still had to solve this problem, so I ended up using the good old method of creating a String package item holding the URL of the image variant. The following code goes at the end of the Resize Image TBB.

Binary binary = m_Engine.PublishingContext.RenderedItem.AddBinary(
    resizedStream, newFilename, variantId, mmc,
    binaryContent.MultimediaType.MimeType);

m_Package.PushItem("MyImage",
    m_Package.CreateStringItem(ContentType.Text, binary.Url));


Therefore in DW TBB, you would just use @@MyImage@@ to output the image variant URL.

<img src="@@MyImage@@"/>


Comments

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...