Skip to main content

TBB of the Week - Render Page Text Block

By Unknown
I thought about starting a new section on my blog -- TBB of the Week. The intention is to publish a new TBB every week that is somehow worthy. Maybe it is a very generic one, or a best practice, or even a bad practice. There should be a description of the TBB, what it does, where/how to use it in a Compound Template. Of course, there will be source code too.

So to start with, the first "TBB of the Week" is going to be Render Page Text Block TBB. I first got this TBB from a colleague of mine, Eric Huiza, so I won't take credit for it.

Name
Render Page Text Block TBB
Type
· Template in .NET Assembly
Description
Used to:
· Publish Text Block scripts (JS or CSS) attached to a Page as metadata;
Notes:
This TBB expects the Page to have metadata field ‘script’ that contains a Component Link to the Text Block Component. The TBB creates an Output item (or overwrites the existing one) with the content of the TextBlock field in the linked Text Block Component.
The Page in this case should not contain any Component Presentations.
Parameters
n/a
Applicable to
Page Templates

I like the idea a lot -- you don't have to create Component Presentations on your Page in order to publish 'static' text assets like JavaScript or CSS. Instead you just attach them to your Page Metadata.

One thing I don't like, is the inability to use the "Where Used" publishing. Namely, if you want to publish the JS/CSS Text Block Component, this setup will not allow that. In a normal situation, where the Component appears on the Page as CP, publishing the Component will publish the Page using it. Not in this case...

The Code

[TcmTemplateTitle("Render Page Text Block TBB")]
public class RenderPageTextBlock : ITemplate {

    public void Transform(Engine engine, Package package) {
        Item pageItem = package.GetByName(Package.PageName);
        Page page = engine.GetObject(pageItem) as Page;

        ItemFields metaFields = new ItemFields(page.Metadata, page.MetadataSchema);
        ComponentLinkField textblockField = metaFields.Where(w => w.Name.Equals("script")).Cast<ComponentLinkField>().ElementAtOrDefault(0);

        if (textblockField != null) {
            Component textblock = textblockField.Value;
            ItemFields itemFields = new ItemFields(textblock.Content, textblock.Schema);

            MultiLineTextField textField = itemFields.Where(w => w.Name.Equals("TextBlock")).Cast<MultiLineTextField>().ElementAt(0);

            Item output = package.GetByName(Package.OutputName);
            if (output == null) {
                package.PushItem(Package.OutputName, package.CreateStringItem(ContentType.Text, textField.Value));
            } else {
                output.SetAsString(textField.Value);
            }
        }
    }
}


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

By
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...
1 comment
Read more

I Have Gone Dark

By Unknown
Maybe it's the Holidays, but my mood has gone pretty dark. That is, regarding the look and feel of my computer and Tridion CME, of course. What I did was to dim the lights on the operating system, so I installed Placebo themes for Windows 7 . I went for the Ashtray look -- great name :) My VM looks now like this: But, once you change the theme on Windows, you should 'match' the theme of your applications. Some skin easily, some not. The Office suite has an in-built scheme, which can be set to Black , but it doesn't actually dim the ribbon tool bars -- it looks quite weird. Yahoo Messenger is skinnable, but you can't change the big white panels where you actually 'chat'. Skype is not skinnable at all. For Chrome, there are plenty of grey themes. Now i'm using Pro Grey . But then I got into changing the theme of websites. While very few offer skinnable interfaces (as GMail does), I had to find a way to darken the websites... Enter Stylish -- a pl...
4 comments
Read more

REL Standard Tag Library

By
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...
2 comments
Read more