Skip to main content

Create and Publish Page for Component in Workflow using Core Service

It seems like this use case keeps coming back time and time again. The requirement: when a new Component is in workflow, part of the approval workflow on the Component should be an automatic Page generation (where the Component is placed on the Page) and possibly publishing of the Page for the purpose of previewing the new Component in a Page context. All this while Component is in workflow, so approver can actually see how the Component looks like before approving/rejecting it.

The only issue, as described in the previous post, is that it is not possible to add a v0.x Component to a Page, when the Page is in a child Publication. The solution is to do all this programmatically.

In the following example, I use the Core Service to create a new Page (with values taken from a Folder metadata, for example) and place the v0.x Component on it.

using (CoreServiceSession coreService = new CoreServiceSession())
{
    if (component.Version < 1)
    {
        TcmUri pageTcmUri = coreService.CreatePage(title, fileName, sgTcmUri, ptTcmUri, localComponentTcmUri, ctTcmUri);
        PublisherHelper publisherHelper = new PublisherHelper();
        publisherHelper.Publish(pageTcmUri, targetTcmUri, true);
    }
}

The Page is first created, then published (as described in my earlier posts about "How to Publish Stuff Programmatically"). The CoreServiceSession method CreatePage is the following:

public TcmUri CreatePage(String title, String fileName, TcmUri sgTcmUri, TcmUri ptTcmUri, TcmUri componentTcmUri, TcmUri ctTcmUri)
{
    PageData pageData = new PageData();
    pageData.Id = TcmUri.UriNull.ToString();
    pageData.Title = title;
    pageData.FileName = fileName;

    LinkToPageTemplateData linkToPageTemplateData = new LinkToPageTemplateData();
    linkToPageTemplateData.IdRef = ptTcmUri.ToString();
    pageData.PageTemplate = linkToPageTemplateData;
    pageData.IsPageTemplateInherited = false;

    LinkToOrganizationalItemData linkToOrganizationalItemData = new LinkToOrganizationalItemData();
    linkToOrganizationalItemData.IdRef = sgTcmUri.ToString();
    LocationInfo locationInfo = new LocationInfo();
    locationInfo.OrganizationalItem = linkToOrganizationalItemData;
    pageData.LocationInfo = locationInfo;

    ComponentPresentationData[] cps = new ComponentPresentationData[1];
    cps[0] = new ComponentPresentationData();
    LinkToComponentData linkToComponentData = new LinkToComponentData();
    linkToComponentData.IdRef = componentTcmUri.ToString();
    cps[0].Component = linkToComponentData;
    LinkToComponentTemplateData linkToComponentTemplateData = new LinkToComponentTemplateData();
    linkToComponentTemplateData.IdRef = ctTcmUri.ToString();
    cps[0].ComponentTemplate = linkToComponentTemplateData;
    pageData.ComponentPresentations = cps;

    IdentifiableObjectData objectData = _coreServiceClient.Create(pageData, ReadOptions);

    return new TcmUri(objectData.Id);
}


Comments

Nivlong said…
Great timing, Mihai. I mentioned the classic automatic page creation scenario the other day waving my hands on the technical details ("it's magic"). Whew, good to know we have multiple ways to combine workflow with code: event system, but also the core service.

Nice naming conventions and clean code, too (no hard-coded ids!). Are the LinkTo...Data objects your own--are they helping manage IDs?
Mihai Cădariu said…
Thanks Alvin! All the *Data objects are Core Service standard objects. That's how content & metadata is represented on the client when using the Core Service.

Popular posts from this blog

A DD4T.net Implementation - Custom Binary Publisher

The default way to publish binaries in DD4T is implemented in class DD4T.Templates.Base.Utils.BinaryPublisher and uses method RenderedItem.AddBinary(Component) . This produces binaries that have their TCM URI as suffix in their filename. In my recent project, we had a requirement that binary file names should be clean (without the TCM URI suffix). Therefore, it was time to modify the way DD4T was publishing binaries. The method in charge with publishing binaries is called PublishItem and is defined in class BinaryPublisher . I therefore extended the BinaryPublisher and overrode method PublishItem. public class CustomBinaryPublisher : BinaryPublisher { private Template currentTemplate; private TcmUri structureGroupUri; In its simplest form, method PublishItem just takes the item and passes it to the AddBinary. In order to accomplish the requirement, we must specify a filename while publishing. This is the file name part of the binary path of Component.BinaryConten

Toolkit - Dynamic Content Queries

This post if part of a series about the  File System Toolkit  - a custom content delivery API for SDL Tridion. This post presents the Dynamic Content Query capability. The requirements for the Toolkit API are that it should be able to provide CustomMeta queries, pagination, and sorting -- all on the file system, without the use third party tools (database, search engines, indexers, etc). Therefore I had to implement a simple database engine and indexer -- which is described in more detail in post Writing My Own Database Engine . The querying logic does not make use of cache. This means the query logic is executed every time. When models are requested, the models are however retrieved using the ModelFactory and those are cached. Query Class This is the main class for dynamic content queries. It is the entry point into the execution logic of a query. The class takes as parameter a Criterion (presented below) which triggers the execution of query in all sub-criteria of a Criterio

Scaling Policies

This post is part of a bigger topic Autoscaling Publishers in AWS . In a previous post we talked about the Auto Scaling Groups , but we didn't go into details on the Scaling Policies. This is the purpose of this blog post. As defined earlier, the Scaling Policies define the rules according to which the group size is increased or decreased. These rules are based on instance metrics (e.g. CPU), CloudWatch custom metrics, or even CloudWatch alarms and their states and values. We defined a Scaling Policy with Steps, called 'increase_group_size', which is triggered first by the CloudWatch Alarm 'Publish_Alarm' defined earlier. Also depending on the size of the monitored CloudWatch custom metric 'Waiting for Publish', the Scaling Policy with Steps can add a difference number of instances to the group. The scaling policy sets the number of instances in group to 1 if there are between 1000 and 2000 items Waiting for Publish in the queue. It also sets the