iStern Blog

Sitecore 6.6 is now out, (as a technical preview), with the realse of this version Sitecore now offers full support for MVC. There have all ready been quite a few blog post how to user MVC with Sitecore and some of the new fetures offers a great deal of ease when developing with Sitecore.

So this is the first in a series of how to develop with Sitecore using MVC and some of the benefits you get for free using MVC.

If you haven’t allready read John West blog post on how to setup you Sitecore solution to use MVC you can read them here start with Part 1 and use part 3 to setup a visual studio solution .John also wrote some simple examples on how to use the MVC framework to return JSON serialized result from a controller you read his original post here. For a first post in this Sitecore MVC series we will revisit his example and create our own controller but with a different approach, and with the soon to be released .Net 4.5 Framework which include the new web-api this should be even easier, and given you even more flexibility for free and out of the box, we will look back at this example when the final release is out.

By now you should now have an up an running Sitecore 6.6 solution. My visual studio solution setup is shown below.

Now lets create our first controller Code listed below.

public class ItemController : Controller
 {

public JsonResult Index(string id)
 {
 return Json(CreateObject(ChildRepository.Get(parentItemId)), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
 }

private ChildItemRepository _childRepository;
 public virtual ChildItemRepository ChildRepository
 {
 get { return _childRepository ?? (_childRepository = new ChildItemRepository()); }

}

private IEnumerable<object> CreateObject(IEnumerable<Item> items)
 {
 foreach (Item item in items)
 yield return new {item.Name};
 }

}

With the controller in place you can change the route to newly created controller John in his example uses a Pipeline in Sitecore to achieve this i like this approache so much more the using the global.asax so we reuse his code for this with some minor alternations. The Id of the node we want to retrieve children for if not specified default to the id of the Home-node. I’ve done this because i don’t like all his assert for empty id, and if you don’t like you can just use the original approach with optional url parameter.You could if liked alsp default the index action. But instead of getting the id trough the url route data you should supply it as a argument to the action method. The key here is that parameter Id must be named the same as the input parameter in index method.

public class SitecoreMVCRoutes
 {

public virtual void Process(Sitecore.Pipelines.PipelineArgs args)
 {
 this.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
 }

public bool MvcIgnoreHomePage { get; set; }

protected virtual void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
 {
 if (this.MvcIgnoreHomePage)
 {
 routes.IgnoreRoute(String.Empty);
 }

routes.MapRoute(
 "Default", // Route name
 "Item/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
 new { controller = "Item", action = "Index", id = "{110D559F-DEA5-42EA-9C1C-8A5DF7E70EF9}" } // Parameter defaults with Id to home node
 );
 }
 }

Now we will implement the busyness layer that will supply the controller with data.

This is done through a ChildRepository the code is listed below.

</pre>
public class ChildItemRepository
 {
 public virtual IEnumerable<Item> Get(string parentItemId)
 {
 ID parentId;
 if(ID.TryParse(parentItemId,out parentId))
 return GetChildNodes(parentId);
return new List<Item>();
 }

private IEnumerable<Item> GetChildNodes(ID parentId)
 {
 Item parentItem = Sitecore.Context.Database.GetItem(parentId);
 return parentItem.GetChildren();
 }
 }
<pre>

Lets test the new controller

First with out supplying a id,

Now with a valid id different form the home-node.

And now with a invalid id.

There we go the code does the same as Johns but with out all the assert tests.