UPDATE: These snippets are out of date, download from this post instead

For you who have developed with the open source CMS N2 CMS, I guess you fell in love in how you are in control over the page type properties. And as a few of you have might notice the newly announced EMVP Joel Abrahamsson has found a really nice way to achieve this with EPiServer.

To create a property there are a few lines of code, and sometimes you might be to lazy to write these lines.. And as you may know there is a great thing in Visual Studio called Snippets that can help you out. A snippet is a XML-based file, and if you are lazy as I am, you probably want some help when you create your own snippets. I can recommend using a program called Snippy.

Here is a step by step how to create your own snippet. In this example I will create a snippet for a “Short string property” to the PageTypeBuilder earlier mentioned. (if you just want to download the snippets, check at the bottom of this post)

1. Download and start Snippy
2. Start by entering some information about the snippet.
   
   The shortcut field is what you have to write in Visual studion to use the snippet.
3. In the Code-area, change language to csharp and paste the code that you would like to make a snippet of. In my case I will use the code to create a definition for a Short string.

   [PageTypeProperty(SortOrder = 100, UniqueValuePerLanguage = true, Searchable=true, Type = typeof(PropertyString))]
   public string Headline
   {
   get
   {
   return GetPropertyValue<StartPageType, string>(page => page.Headline);
   }
   
   set
   {
   SetPropertyValue<StartPageType, string>(page => page.Headline, value);
   }
   }
   

   

4. If we save the snippet now, we would actually have a functional snippet, but there a few things that we would like to change..
   In this snippet I would like to change SortOrder, UniqueValuePerLangugae, Searchable, Headline(PropertyName) and the StartPageType(which pagetype this property should be saved/read to/from)
   In “Literal & Objects” we can define so these things mentioned above could be changed by just tabbing around when we are using our snippet.
5. Let’s start with SortOrder. Press the “Add…”-button.
   • ID: the “variable”-name that we will refer to in the code-area
   • Tooltip: a little help-text when you are using the snippet
   • Default value: when using the snippet and you ignore this part you get the default value
   • Function: There are a few predefined functions you can use, we will use one later to retrive the class name of the page type. You can read more about the functions here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms242312(VS.80).aspx
   • Declaration type: Yo can read about the difference here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165396(VS.80).aspx. We will use Literals.
   • Editable: Everything except the PageType should be editable by the user

   This is how the SortOrder should look like.
   

   And when we refer to it in the code area we use the ID surronded with $-signs, like $SortOrder$.
   

6. Continue with the others, the only special one is the PageType. For this one we need to use a function called ClassName() and the Editable-box should not be checked.
   
7. This is how it should look like when you are done:
   

   
   As yo can see the PropertyName is used several times, but you will only need to enter it once.

8. Now save your snippet. I think the right directory will choosen, if not it should be saved in “My Documents\Visual Studio [2005/2008]\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets”
9. Open up visual studio, and in a class start typing the shorcut name given, and it will be shown in the intellisene.
   
10. Press Tab, Tab and you can now use your snippet.
    

I’ve only created three snippets so far. You can download them here! (Unzip in “My Documents\Visual Studio [2005/2008]\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets”)

Feel free to contribute with your own snippets to the PageTypeBuilder, I will probably update this blog post as a create new ones.

Here are a few tips about scheduled tasks that may spare you some debugging and angry moments.

First of all, if you are interested in how you create a simple scheduled job, please check out Ted Nybergs post.

Several developers / Load balancing environment

If the same site is up’n’running on several computers/servers but with a shared database, the scheduled job might run at the “wrong” machine. There is a setting in web.config which controls if the scheduler should be run by this instance or not. It’s an attribute to <siteSettings> called “enableScheduler”, eg. <siteSettings enableScheduler=”false” …. /> if you don’t want the scheduler to run in this instance/machine.

Another way, not to tell if the job should be executed or not, but if you want to know which computer that executed the job, is to return the computer name with the return message. This can save you a lot of frustration when are about to pull you hair of cause the changes you make in to code doesn’t affect to job. 🙂

return "[Computer: " + System.Environment.MachineName + "] " + returnMessage;

Object reference not set to an instance…
Sometimes when you work with scheduled jobs, you can get this error, even though the only thing your job does is to return a “hellow world”. I’ve experienced this a few times, but never put much effort in to find out what causes this.
However, you can easily go around this by deleteing your job and create a new one with a slightly different class name.

Impersonate
In some cases you might need to run to job as a certain user.
Specially when you want to use FindPagesWithCriteria in EPiServer CMS 5 R2. It ignores the AccessControlList and only fetches pages that the current user has access rights to read. In R2 SP1 there is a new method called FindAllPagesWithCriteria which is supposed to find all pages despite access rights.
Well, this is how you login:

[ScheduledPlugIn(Description = "Test job with impersonated user", DisplayName = "Test job")]
public class TestJob
{

public static string Execute()
{
string returnMessage;

if (EnterImpersonatedState("erik.nordin", "password"))
{
returnMessage = "Job executed with user " + PrincipalInfo.CurrentPrincipal.Identity.Name;
LeaveImpersonatedState();
}
else
{
returnMessage = "Failed to login";
}
return "[Computer: " + System.Environment.MachineName + "] " + returnMessage;
}

private static IPrincipal prevPrincipal;
private static bool EnterImpersonatedState(string userName, string password)
{
IPrincipal impersonatedUser = null;

// If you don't want to validate the user, you can use skip the if-statement:
if (Membership.ValidateUser(userName, password))
{
impersonatedUser = PrincipalInfo.CreatePrincipal(userName);
}

if (impersonatedUser == null)
{
return false;
}

prevPrincipal = PrincipalInfo.CurrentPrincipal;
PrincipalInfo.CurrentPrincipal = impersonatedUser;

return true;
}

private static void LeaveImpersonatedState()
{
PrincipalInfo.CurrentPrincipal = prevPrincipal;
}
}