Recommended Practices Part 1

New Beginnings!

So the first thing that I should share is that I recently left Sitecore to go back to a pure developer type of role.   While I am very sad to leave Sitecore, I really missed being a developer and didn’t want to lose that “code monkey” side of myself.  I found a new home and I couldn’t have asked for a better place to transition to.  I’m working now with XCentium.  It is a real privilege to be working with such a talented group.. and a little unnerving discussing Sitecore with these guys.  For example, my boss has been involved with Sitecore from its conception, another guy was at Sitecore for years until recently when he left Sitecore to go to XCentium, and one of my teammates just received the MVP distinction from Sitecore.  So with that being said, let me say that those discussions are what triggered this post.  I’m trying to learn some of the details about getting back into being part of a full-time development team and it got me thinking about a few things.   I’m passionate about what I do and somewhat anal about development practices and having seen enough bad development practices, I have a few things I’d like to share.

Minor Rant

So as I was going over some of the work that I did during my time with Sitecore Technical Services, one of my duties included doing site reviews.  In doing so, I would basically look at all aspects of a site and determine if the client was practicing the Sitecore recommended best practices in each area.  What I usually found was that there were lots of areas that were lacking and could easily be updated to get the site within standards.  Mostly, I think, this is just due to a lack of knowledge about what those recommended practices were.  There is a document on the SDN that covers the Sitecore Best Practices, however, I think it’s one of those things that unless you have a need to look at it, most people don’t.  I thought it would be helpful to cover some of the things that I often saw that can be implemented very easily, and in a lot of cases, can be applied on existing sites without disturbing the content in place.  Lets start with one of the biggies.

Templates and Standard Values

Inheritance: Now, templates is the one thing that while there are some things you can change (which I’ll get to), it’s very difficult to fix template problems that result from bad architecture.  One school of thought seems to say to keep the number of templates to a minimum, but I think that is mostly in terms of trying to encourage using inheritance.  Keep in mind that it’s perfectly acceptable to create templates that have NO fields and simply inherit from another template just so that a different set of standard values is implemented.  By the way, if you don’t know about template inheritance, let me just say, You’re doing it wrong!  PLEASE.. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD.. learn about it before you build your next site!  Some benefits of using inheritance is that you have a lot less work, everything has much more flexibility and content is much easier to maintain.  Also, realize that your template standard values for base templates inherits down.  That’s a very powerful tool to have!  And if nothing else, you should ALWAYS have at least one base template that ALL templates inherit from. 

Template Folder Structure:  Of course its best to keep your templates in an ordered structure.  This isn’t usually a problem.  One thing that is helpful, however, is to keep templates organized in such a way that makes it clear the purpose.. specifically templates that are stand alone pages on the site vs. templates that are components used by other templates or metadata for the site, etc.  For example, one of the things I often had to do was help set workflow… but in a lot of cases, you don’t want workflow on templates that are just component templates.  It’s very helpful to know which templates need to have workflow and which aren’t necessary or may need a different workflow.  Given Sitecore’s ability to dynamically update links, simple drag and drop is completely doable (as long as you don’t have hard-coded paths to your templates in your code, of course… but we’ll get to coding standards later).  

Icons: Use UNIQUE ICONS!!! For fucks sake.  It’s so quick and easy to set an icon for each of your templates and makes such a difference!  If you are a new user tasked with anything that means having to know what content is what and where to find it,  giving your templates a UNIQUE icon is sooooo  helpful!!!   The poor marketing guy who just started a new job and has to go find all the pages that need to be connected to his new marketing campaign will love you for it.  This doesn’t stop at the marketing users either.  Think about the new developer who has to try to understand the structure of the existing site that they’ve just been hired to maintain.  They open up Sitecore, only to find a site full of white document icons that are all the generic and all the templates have names that may mean something to you but not a thing to them.  Those white document icon and with names that don’t mean anything to them but if you give your templates unique icons, just a glance suggests the structure.  This is soooo easily changed!!!  Just look:

I found this illustration on a Nick Allen’s blog where he illustrated this very nicely.  Which would you prefer?

Template Standard Values: Another thing to point out is to make sure that you are filling in values on the template standard values.  Now, to be clear, icons can be set on the template itself since this should be a property of the icon item itself. A good thing to keep in mind is that if the field value belongs to the template, then it should go on the template.  If the value belongs to the items that are created from it, then add the value to the template standard values.  There are a few template standard values that are important to fill in and are often times neglected:

• Insert Options: Some really, REALLY important things to fill in  are the Insert Options field.  Keep in mind that you, as a developer, have the right to use the Insert from Template.  Marketing users do not.  In many cases, if you use the placeholders as you should, then unless something is in the Insert Options, a regular user can’t even choose the content type to insert.
•  Workflow:  The way that workflow is implemented is that the Default Workflow field is going to be the one that new items inherit from.  You’ll want to make sure that this is the ONLY value you set on a template standard values.  DO NOT set the Workflow field itself.
• Layout values.  Lots of people fail to set the layout standard values and while it’s not the end of the world, think about the hassle of realizing it after the fact, updating it and suddenly remembering that you have just changed the banner on a bunch of pages that inherited from a template that inherits from the template you just changed.  In fact, in 90+% of all the time, there is NO reason for content to ever be outside of the template standard values.

Standard Fields: Be aware of the standard fields for templates.  For example, take some time to get familiar with what all those fields do.  Many of them are very helpful and are blank more often than they’re used.  For example, if there is a field that the end users need a bit of explanation to understand its purpose, you can use Help fields and includes the ability to add images to give it context.  Which brings up that image fields should ALWAYS have a media folder path set.  One thing that I see happen a LOT is that a media library is a jumbled mess of random images scattered here and there because image fields do not have a source defined.  Without this, when a user goes to find an image to place in an image field, there is no standard location for where it’s at and they end up uploading the image they need to random places.  The media library tends to get really messy, really fast.  I’ll touch more on this later though.  Setting a source also works for a Rich Text field.  You can set the default rich text in the web.config, but consider that you want to give users a certain font or snippet set to use in some templates but not others.  This is very rarely used and can have such an impact on how business are allowed to input their content.   Finally, most people know that the Display Name field can be used for item names that are not SEO friendly.  Remember, however, that this field exists on the standard template, so you can use it for template field names that aren’t user-friendly too!

So I had planned on making this a post to touch on each of the areas, but we’ll touch on the other areas next.

Next:  Information Architecture.  Now that you know how to create your templates, lets look at some ways to improve the structure of content.

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up for now.  Look for the next installment.  And as always, happy Sitecoring!

 

Advanced System Reporter Customization

As a Sitecore employee, I spend a lot of time doing site reviews.  One of the best ways to get a quick snapshot of things is via the Advanced System Reporter module.  I’ve learned quite a bit about modifying the reports and creating my own using this module.

Adding Fields to Results

The first thing that I found that I didn’t realize was possible is to add in additional fields to a result set.  For example, say you wanted to view the Not Recently modified report. Your base page template has a custom field called “Region” that is used to categorize the which region the content applies to.  You want to follow-up on some of this old content and so you want to be able to see the value in the Region field.  If you edit the report, you can see that it uses the Item Viewer as the viewer for the report.  In the configuration area for the ASR module, under Viewers, if you locate the Item Viewer, you can view that to see the fields it renders.  Opening that, you can see a default list of fields that it renders, but of course, it doesn’t include the Region field. If you click the Edit button in the “Viewer” section to add new fields, the field options available do not include the Region field. As it turns out, you can add this field.. very easily!

Any of the viewer items can be edited to add or remove fields that it shows.  To do this, you can either click the drop-down next to the Column Name and choose a field that represents what you want and then click the Column Header box and give the header a name.  Clicking Add, it’ll add that and you should now see it on the results page.  You can, however, click the drop-down box and making sure that the top value is selected (this is configurable, by the way), you can simply type the name of the field, a name of the Column Header and then click the Add button.  If you need to change or correct it, or add another custom field, after you add the field, click it again and hit delete to clear the value and type a new field name.

A useful thing about this is that you can create your own custom viewer items for viewing specific fields that may be useful in multiple reports.  Then in those reports, you would simply add the new Viewer to the existing viewer on the report.  This will create a combined view of all the column headers in a single report.

Updated Filter

Here’s some simple code I adapted that is similar to the “Created Between” field, but instead allows you to filter by the Updated dates.  I put this in the Filter folder in the ASR.Reports solution.

class UpdatedBetween : BaseFilter
 {
 /// <summary>
 /// Gets from date.
 /// </summary>
 /// <value>From date.</value>
 public DateTime FromDate { get; set; }
/// <summary>
 /// Gets to date.
 /// </summary>
 /// <value>To date.</value>
 public DateTime ToDate { get; set; } /// <summary>
 /// Whether to use the first version
 /// </summary>
 /// <value>Use first version.</value>
 public bool UseFirstVersion { get; set; }
public override bool Filter(object element)
 {
 Item item = null;
 if (element is Item)
 {
 item = element as Item;
 }
 else if (element is ItemWorkflowEvent)
 {
 item = (element as ItemWorkflowEvent).Item;
 }
 if (item != null)
 {
 if (UseFirstVersion)
 {
 var versions = item.Versions.GetVersionNumbers();
 var minVersion = versions.Min(v => v.Number);
 item = item.Database.GetItem(item.ID, item.Language, new Version(minVersion)); 
 }
 DateTime dateUpdated = item.Statistics.Updated;
 if (FromDate <= dateUpdated && dateUpdated < ToDate)
 {
 return true;
 }
 }
 return false;
 }

Items with Template Inheritance

I thought I’d share a couple other things I created.  The first is that none of the parameters allow for choosing items that might use a certain template either as the type or as a base template.  This is a little resource intense, but I had a client who needed this and creating this made them very happy.. so I figure someone else will probably need this too.

The first thing you have to do is create a Template parameter.  This is basically an item selector that will only allow you to choose from templates.  Create a new item under System > Modules > ASR > Configuration > Parameters.  I called mine Template.  The type is going to be Item Selector since we’re selecting a TemplateItem.  I set my default value to the Standard template.  Next, the filter value I set to this so that it will start with the Template root item and then return back a tree for the templates.

displayresult=Name|valueresult=ID|root={3C1715FE-6A13-4FCF-845F-DE308BA9741D}|folder={3C1715FE-6A13-4FCF-845F-DE308BA9741D}|filter=@@templatename='Template' or @@templatename='Folder' or @@templatename='Template Folder'

The first thing we need is to create a custom class that does this.  Here’s the code for my class that I adapted from one of the other scanner classes:

class ContentWithInheritance : BaseScanner
 {
 public readonly static string DB_PARAMETER = "db";
 public readonly static string ROOT_PARAMETER = "root";
 public readonly static string CASCADE_PARAMETER = "search";
 public readonly static string TEMPLATE_PARAMETER = "template";
// This initializes the scan
public override ICollection Scan()
 {
 var databasename = getParameter(DB_PARAMETER);
 var db = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(databasename) ? Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase(databasename) ?? Sitecore.Context.ContentDatabase : Sitecore.Context.ContentDatabase;
// This grabs the item that is chosen as the root item for the items to scan. 
var rootpath = getParameter(ROOT_PARAMETER);
var rootitem = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(rootpath) ? db.GetItem(rootpath) ?? db.GetRootItem() : db.GetRootItem();
// This grabs the template that is selected by the Template parameter in our Scanner Item.
var template = getParameter(TEMPLATE_PARAMETER);
TemplateItem templateItem = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(template) ? db.GetTemplate(template) : rootitem.Template;
// This selects the scope for the scan
Item[] items;
 switch (getParameter(CASCADE_PARAMETER))
 {
 case "0": //children
 items = rootitem.Children.InnerChildren.ToArray();
 break;
 case "1": //descendants 
 items = rootitem.Axes.SelectItems("descendant-or-self::*");
 break;
 default:
 //case "-1": //item
 items = new[] { rootitem };
 break;
 }
var results = new ArrayList();

foreach (Item item in items)
 {
 if (IsTemplateDescendant(item, templateItem))
 results.Add(item);
 }
 return results;
 }
// Here's a simple check that looks at the template and then all the base templates until it finds a match. 
private static bool IsTemplateDescendant(Item item, TemplateItem template)
 {
 return ((item.TemplateID == template.ID) || IsTemplateDescendant(item.Template, template.ID));
}
private static bool IsTemplateDescendant(TemplateItem templateItem, ID itemTemplate)
 {
 if (templateItem == null || ID.IsNullOrEmpty(itemTemplate))
 {
 return false;
 }
 return ((templateItem.ID == itemTemplate) || templateItem.BaseTemplates.Any(baseTemplate => IsTemplateDescendant(baseTemplate, itemTemplate)));
 }
 }

As you might imagine, this is fairly resource intensive, so you may want to limit the items scanned rather than scanning the whole “Content” tree to start.

Next, you’ll need to create a scanner item.  I created one called Items with Template Inheritance.   This will take an Item selector parameter and a Template parameter as we saw in the code.  So the fields look like this:

Assembly:  ASR.Reports

Class:  ASR.Reports.Scanners.ContentWithInheritance

Attributes:  root={Root}|search={Search}|template={Template}

Now you can use this scanner in a report to return back only items that inherit from your chosen template. Now, for those times when you need to find all the items of a certain type, you’re all set.

I hope this was useful for someone.   Happy Sitecoreing!

Custom Access Rights and Workflow Commands

 

So one of my clients had a specific need to allow a specific subset of users to be able to publish stuff directly to the web, bypassing the workflow.  Sounds easy?  Here’s the specifics of their needs:

• They only have 1 workflow in place for all site(s).
• Content templates are varied and do not necessarily inherit from a specific template
• They need to have only some users bypass the workflow only on some items while other items they should only have their regular permissions.
• The workflow in place is a simple “Editing –  Approval  – Published” 3 step workflow.
• There is a very large amount of existing content all over a very large site which any major change could potentially have an impact on.
• The developers for the site are in China and the client is a site admin out of New York with no access at all to the file system or server.

So… here’s my thought process:

This was actually a lot trickier than I had first expected and in digging in to things, I found that there were hidden levels of complexity with the particulars of the solution that I didn’t expect.  Basically I tried to find a way to do this strictly on the front end without the need to add any custom code.  There was just no way that I could think of to do this on the front end only without a risk to the current solution.   I actually tried multiple approaches to find a way to implement this that wouldn’t require access to the backend.

Second Workflow?

This is complex.  There is existing content already published using their main workflow.  New versions of this content would need to use the new workflow.  New versions of the content would ONLY need to use this workflow for some users and not others.  The content template was not the same across the board for their needs. Not only would we need to get the existing content moved to the new workflow, but we’d need to work out some logic to assure that a subset of all newly created items would use the new workflow and override standard values for only a specific group.  This would work, but it’s a potentially complex solution to implement, would require a lot of custom coding and would potentially be difficult to maintain.

Create New Templates?

This assumes that the content in question lives in a single folder.  Another option would be to create a template that inherits from the current template(s) and set the workflow on standard values.  This could mean multiple new templates that need to be created (the folder would have to be inventoried to make sure which ones), but more importantly, it would require changing the template on existing content, potentially breaking it in the process.  This approach, I think is very clunky and would also be difficult to maintain.

Custom Access Right!! 

What I came up with instead is a way to alter the existing workflow to simply add another command that in addition to the “Submit” the appropriate users would also see a “Direct Publish” command along with the “Submit” command.  The new command sets the next state to be “Approved” instead of “Waiting Approval” and proceeds through the workflow as usual to the normal “approved” state.  Since the Approved state has an autopublish action on it, they simply need to get it to the approved state and the workflow does it’s thing.

To control access to this command, we would create a role(s) and then grant only that role the Workflow Command Execute right.  The tricky part of that, however, is to limit when that command is available since that should only be an option on certain items.  The easiest way to do that is to create a new access right, configure which items would have the option to set the right on it (such as by setting a “root” item and then it inherits down to its descendants allowing that right in the security editor for the specific role.  This result is that the only the items specified can have the right set and any other items that it’s not set on or not allowed, will not give access to this additional command.  This approach is completely flexible, it’s extendable to add other subsets of items to have this same permission, and its controlled via standard Sitecore security.

Code now please?

First.. you need to have the access right.  It must inherit from AccessRight

public class DirectPublishAccessRight : AccessRight
 {
public DirectPublishAccessRight(string name) : base(name) { }
public static AccessRight DirectPublish { get { return FromName("direct:publish"); } }
 }

Next, I need to hijack the authorization helper for items so that Sitecore knows to check my access right.  Here’s how I did that:

public class DirectPublishAuthorizationHelper : ItemAuthorizationHelper
    {
        protected override AccessResult GetItemAccess(Item item, Account account, AccessRight accessRight, PropagationType propagationType)
        {
            //This method applies the specified AccessRight.           
            var result = base.GetItemAccess(item, account, accessRight, propagationType);

            // First, lets check to see if the result returns back anything or if it's denied, return since we don't need to do anything
            if (result == null || result.Permission != AccessPermission.Allow)
            {
                return result;
            } 

           //  If the access right isn't our new access right, pass it on to be handled by the base object methods.
           //  From here on out, only checks against the direct publish access will get through.
            if (accessRight.Name != "direct:publish")
            {
                return result;
            }

            //  Now, if the access right is not even applicable to the item for this user, return it as not set.  
            if (!AccessRightManager.IsApplicable(accessRight,item))
            {
                return new AccessResult(AccessPermission.NotSet, new AccessExplanation("Access right not applicable", null));
            }

            //  if the access right gets this far, the permission is going to be allowed. 
            var ex = new AccessExplanation("This item can apply the Direct Publish command");
            return new AccessResult(AccessPermission.Allow, ex); 

        }
    }

Now that we have that done, we have to work out exactly how we’re going to get Sitecore to use the helper class we just created. Here’s how we did that:

public class DirectPublishAuthorizationProvider : SqlServerAuthorizationProvider
    {
        public DirectPublishAuthorizationProvider()
        {
            _itemHelper = new DirectPublishAuthorizationHelper();
        }        
        private ItemAuthorizationHelper _itemHelper;
        protected override ItemAuthorizationHelper ItemHelper
        {
            get { return _itemHelper; }
            set { _itemHelper = value; }
        }
    }

Here’s the access right.  Next I’ll add in the Workflow code that I used to be able to take control of the commands that were visible.  Look for the next installment on that soon!

Please let me know if you have any pointers.  This was a real challenge for me and the lack of documentation on this made it a challenge to implement.

 

ECM Users and Roles

Let me state that one of the things I have to do is help clients come up with a solution for some situation that they find themselves in and Sitecore doesn’t have an out of the box solution for.  Tonight I had a request from a co-worker to see if I had any ideas on how to clean up a mess they made trying to implement Email Campaign Manager without any real plan for what they doing or the impact that it would have on the site.  Essentially, what happened is that a young, eager beaver developer read through what ECM did, decided it was the perfect tool to handle the all the correspondence that they sent to their users and promptly installed the module for a closer look.  After a quick investigation, he found the import function, quickly downloaded their userbase into CSV and started the import process happily on his way to sending glorious emails.  At some point he either decided it was taking too long or something.. but he managed to make a huge mess out of the user base that they had.  I’m not sure the whole extent since this was a co-worker, but now they needed to know how to get rid of all those users out of their database.  Sitecore, by default, allows you to delete users.. one at a time.  This is just not feasible if you mistakenly import your whole user base in and decide you don’t want it.  I’ve done that before and ended up just starting with a fresh Core database so then used serialization to get my data back. I happened to be working on another thing for another client that was actually the exact opposite of this situation and decided that if I could use the API to import users.. I could do it to get rid of them.   I built out a page that handles this and thought it might come in handy to someone else out there.   I’ve tested this briefly with test content and it worked just fine.  Your results may vary.. so please, please, if you use this, back up your CORE database first.  It’s only something I wrote for a quick fix that might be easier than starting with a fresh Core DB.

This is a simple .aspx page that I would suggest placing in your /sitecore/admin folder.  That ensures that only an administrator level user can access it at all.  Once logged in, it will allow you to choose a domain.. which auto populates all the roles for that domain.  The domain selection wasn’t really necessary, but I also had the idea that you could edit the selection of domains to restrict someone from accidentally deleting something like your whole extranet user base by accident. You then choose the role that you want to remove and presto.. any user that belongs to that role will be deleted along with the role.  Again, this is NOT really meant for anything other than cleaning up an ECM install or some other situation that you need to get rid of a lot of users in one fell swoop that are stored in the Core database so don’t leave nasty grams complaining that it didn’t work for you if you are doing anything other than using the out of the box Sitecore ASP.NET membership provider.   Also, if you simply want to remove users from roles, this can easiliy be edited to do that.. but at this time, it is NOT.  This deletes the user account and the role completely.

Finally, I have, by default, disabled this page by default.  One must edit the page, similar to how some other admin type of pages that come with Sitecore are configured to work. Enabling or disabling it means manually editing the .aspx page and setting a property on the page to true.. which enables and disabled the button that submits things.  Enjoy and again, please note that it’s very late and I’m very tired and if you find obvoius flaws. please share them politely so that I may correct my code.

Thank you and happy Sitecoreing!

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" %>
<DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<script runat="server">

// TODO: to enable the page, set enableUnlockButton = true;
private bool enableUnlockButton = false;

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 this.SubmitButton.Enabled = this.enableUnlockButton;
 if (!Page.IsPostBack)
 {
 this.Domain.DataSource = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDomainNames();
 this.Domain.DataBind();
 this.Domain.Items.Insert(0,new ListItem("Please select a domain",""));
 SubmitButton.OnClientClick = "return confirm('Are you sure you wish to delete the users in this role and the role?');";
 }
}

protected void SubmitButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 try
 {
 if (Roles.SelectedValue.Length > 0)
 {
 List<string> users = new List<string>(System.Web.Security.Roles.GetUsersInRole(Domain.SelectedValue + '\\' + Roles.SelectedValue));
 if (users.Count > 0)
 {

foreach (string s in users)
 {
 System.Web.Security.Membership.DeleteUser(s);
 }
 }
 System.Web.Security.Roles.DeleteRole(Domain.SelectedValue + '\\' + Roles.SelectedValue);
 Domain.SelectedIndex = 0;
 Roles.Items.Clear();
 }
 }
 catch (Exception)
 {

throw;
 }
}

protected void Domain_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 try
 {
   if (Domain.SelectedValue.Length > 0)
   {
      List<string> roles = new List<string>();
      foreach (string s in System.Web.Security.Roles.GetAllRoles())
      {
        if (s.Contains(Domain.SelectedValue))
           roles.Add(s.Remove(0, s.LastIndexOf('\\') + 1));
      }
      Roles.DataSource = roles;
      Roles.DataBind();
   }
  else
   Roles.Items.Clear();
 }
 catch (Exception)
 {
    throw;
 }
}

protected void descriptionLiteral_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   this.descriptionLiteral.Visible = !this.enableUnlockButton;
}

</script>
<head runat="server">
 <title>Remove Users in Sitecore Role</title>
<style type="text/css">
body
 {
   font-family: normal 11pt "Times New Roman", Serif;
 }

.Warning
 {
   color: red;
 }

</style>
</head>
<body>
 <form id="form1" runat="server">
 <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server" />
 <div>
    <asp:Literal runat="server" ID="descriptionLiteral" EnableViewState="false" OnPreRender="descriptionLiteral_PreRender">
      <p>This page is currently disabled.</p></pre>
To enable the page, modify the ASPX page and set enableUnlockButton = true.
    </asp:Literal>
    <h1>Remove All Sitecore Users in a Sitecore Role </h1>
    <h2>Use this form to remove all users permanently that are in the selected Domain and Role.</pre>
    <h2>In order for this form to work, it must be placed in the /sitecore/admin folder.&nbsp;</h2>
    <h2 class="Warning">PLEASE BACK UP YOUR CORE DATABASE! </h2>
    <h2 class="Warning">This is NOT reversible!! Please make sure you know what you're doing!!!</h2>
      <table>
          <tr>
           <td style="width:200px;">
             <asp:Label ID="DomainLabel" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="Domain">
              <asp:Literal text="Domain:" runat="server" />
             </asp:Label>
           </td>
           <td>
           <asp:DropDownList AutoPostBack="true" ID="Domain" runat="server" style="width:300;" onselectedindexchanged="Domain_SelectedIndexChanged" />
           </td>
         </tr>
          <tr>
            <td align="right">
             <asp:Label ID="RolesLabel" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="Roles">
             <asp:Literal Text="Roles:" runat="server" />
             </asp:Label>
          </td>
           <td>
             <asp:UpdatePanel ID="UpdatePanel1" runat="server">
              <ContentTemplate>
                <asp:DropDownList ID="Roles" runat="server" />
              </ContentTemplate>
              <Triggers>
                <asp:PostBackTrigger ControlID="Domain" />
              </Triggers>
             </asp:UpdatePanel>
            </td>
          </tr>
          <tr>
            <td>&nbsp;</td>
            <td><asp:Button ID="SubmitButton" runat="server" Text="Submit" OnClick="SubmitButton_Click" /></td>
          </tr>
        </table>
       </div>
      </form>
   </body>
</html>

WFFM Custom Field Type made easy!

Anyone who has used the Sitecore module “Web Forms for Marketers” knows that although the module is absolutely the coolest thing ever to let marketing people create all their own forms, if you’re a developer and you need to make a form that has a form field with any bit of back-end logic to it, there’s just no way to do any of that with the out of the box form fields.  There is some excellent documentation out on the SDN for creating custom user fields.. however, it’s not complete in that there are 2 types of forms fields – A User control field type (basically an ascx type of file) and a Web Control that you would create from scratch.  The documentation covers creating the web control type of field.  However, I think most people would find it much more useful to create a simple ascx type file to extend a normal field type to allow for back-end business logic to be performed.  This is my purpose for this post.

So basically what I was needing was to be able to take a drop down list, populate it with Sitecore type data..which you can do.. except that this data required a complex query to filter items.. and then the items needed to be sorted.  Sitecore query handles that query very well.  Anyone who has built a template has gotten familiar with this and the module handles that quite well.  The problem is that there just isn’t any way to put an inline command for sorting and WFFM doesn’t have any out of the box way to sort data dynamically generated date in the drop down field type.

The thing to realize is that user control field types really are just a basic user control that extends the WFFM base user control – Sitecore.Form.Web.UI.Controls.BaseUserControl.  Also, in order to use the “Title” that is specified in the form designer, you’ll need to implement the  Sitecore.Form.Web.UI.Controls.IHasTitle interface.

Oh and lemme add this because you’ll need it for the sorting:

public class SimpleComparer : Comparer

{<br />
   // This just compares the items and sorts them by their name.<br />
   protected override int DoCompare(Item item1, Item item2)

   {<br />
      string x = item1.Name;<br />
      string y = item2.Name;<br />
      return x.CompareTo(y);<br />
   }<br />
}</p></pre>

This is easy enough to do.. but since it took me a bit to sort through the WFFM assembly to find out what it was doing, I’ll save you guys some of the trouble.   I tried this in a 6.5 instance with WFFM 2.3 and my control worked beautifully.   Basically your control needs to inherit a few classes and then create your control like you would any other control. And no comments about my choice of coding techniques! I don’t care.. that’s not my point.

    // The control must inherit either &quot;BaseUserControl&quot; for user controls or &quot;BaseControl&quot; for web controls.  I also<br />
    // implement the IHasTitle interface to allow the user to set the title for the field in the form designer diaglog.

    public partial class CustomFormDropdown : Sitecore.Form.Web.UI.Controls.BaseUserControl, Sitecore.Form.Web.UI.Controls.IHasTitle

    {<br />
        // This sets the value of the label to be the value set by the user in the form designer.<br />
        public string Title<br />
        {<br />
            get<br />
            {<br />
                return this.DropLabel.Text;<br />
            }<br />
            set<br />
            {<br />
                this.DropLabel.Text = value;<br />
            }<br />
        }</p></pre>
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
<pre>
        {<br />
            //create my collection of Sitecore items with a Sitecore query.  This can be done however works best for you.<br />
            //This list, actually, is collecting all the Workflow action items.. for no other reason than that I didn't want to bother creating it<br />
            List selectionItems = new List();

            selectionItems.AddRange(Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems(&quot;/sitecore/system/Workflows//*[@@templatename='Command']&quot;));</p></pre>
//Sending item collection off to a comparer class.
<pre>
            SimpleComparer com = new SimpleComparer();

            selectionItems.Sort(com);</p>
<p>            //binding the data to my drop down list item.<br />
            ActionTitle.DataSource = selectionItems;<br />
            ActionTitle.DataValueField = &quot;ID&quot;;<br />
            ActionTitle.DataTextField = &quot;Name&quot;;<br />
            ActionTitle.DataBind();<br />
            ControlContainer.CssClass = this.CssClass;<br />
        }</p></pre>

Now that you have created your user control, the last step is to implement the code that WFFM will need to be able to get the value from our form field. You can also implement some of our custom properties as well. Depending on what you put in this area, you can add additional fields to your form designer.

</p>
<p>        // Properties that are added by the form designer.  These are purely optional and are here to show you that you can do this if you want<br />
        // Notice there are properties such as "DefaultValue" that can be left blank.

        [VisualProperty("Css Class:", 600), DefaultValue ("scfDroplistBorder"), VisualFieldType(typeof(CssClassField))]

        public string CssClass { get; set; }</pre>
&nbsp;
<pre>
<p>        // Properties<br />
        [VisualProperty("Help:", 500), VisualFieldType(typeof(TextAreaField)), Localize, VisualCategory("Appearance")]

        public string Information { get; set; }</p></pre>
// Take note!!  This is the mucho important part!!!
<pre>
        // This is required by WFFM to get the value from the drop down when the user submits the form.

        // This is all the code you need!<br />
        public override Sitecore.Form.Core.Controls.Data.ControlResult Result<br />
        {<br />
            get<br />
            {<br />
                //ControlName is automatically set by WFFM.  Don't set this.

                //The second part is for a string to represent the value of your drop down.<br />
                //The 3rd one is for optional parameters and is completely optional.

                return new Sitecore.Form.Core.Controls.Data.ControlResult(this.ControlName, this.ActionTitle.SelectedValue, null);<br />
            }<br />
        }<br />

Here’s my simple html ascx page.

<p>
<asp:Panel ID="ControlContainer" runat="server">
  <asp:Label ID="DropLabel" runat="server" CssClass="scfDropListLabel" AssociatedControlID="ActionTitle" />
  <asp:Panel ID="DropDownPanel" CssClass="scfDropListGeneralPanel" runat="server">
    <asp:<span class="hiddenSpellError">DropDownList runat="server" id="ActionTitle" CssClass="scDropList" />
    <asp:Label ID="dropDownHelp" Style="display:none" runat="server" />
  </asp:Panel>
</asp:Panel>
<br />
</p>

Now as I said, there were some optional fields that you can set up to show in the form designer. If you don’t do that.. then your form field will have no fields other than the title and analytics which is handled within Sitecore anyway. Once you have your user control saved, go into the /sitecore/Settings/Modules/Web Forms for Marketers/Settings/Field Types/Custom , create a new item using the Field Type template. Then down in the “code” area of the item, put in the link to your control “/controls/CustomFormDropdown.ascx” (without the quotes).

Now, when you create or edit forms, you’ll have your new user control available and it should return its value without incident and you now have a snazzy new form field type for future use.

Please let me know if I’m forgetting anything here..

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