Multiple Image Support in PropertyList

While working on a past project with heavy use of IList<T> properties I ran into several usability situations. One of those situations involved read-only values that were being imported from an external system. They needed to appear in the CollectionEditor, but did not need to be editable (read about that here). Another scenario I encountered involved images in the CollectionEditor. It started off with a simple implementation of the solution provided by Grzegorz Wiecheć, but evolved into something more.

One of the challenges we faced was the customer's need for multiple images in the list, and those images not always sharing the same property name. As with the issue around default values, some of the data for this was being synchronized with an external system, so we needed to be flexible with the property names and the number of image properties that might be present in the list.

DefaultValue in PropertyList

When Episerver brought out PropertyList support in 9.0 and showed the world how to utilize it (read the article here) it rocked the Episerver developer community and changed the way we utilize the CMS to this day! Okay, that's obviously an exaggeration, but it did introduce a different property type to the community, and brought about a different way of supporting lists or collections of data, that didn't require a bunch of blocks added to a ContentArea.

As interesting as it is, however, there are some shortcomings to this functionality. After all, it's mentioned in the linked article that it is a "pre-release API that is UNSTABLE." It's expected to have some quirks and shortcomings. Thankfully, as has already been demonstrated by Grzegorz, in his PropertyList with Images article, the PropertyList, or more importantly the CollectionEditor, can be extended to modify the functionality to fit different needs.

In this article I am taking a similar approach to Grzegorz to extend the functionality, but instead of supporting images in the list, I needed to support a default value specified through code.

A Simple Language Selector in Episerver

On my current Episerver project, we had a need to support a couple languages for the website, and display them via a simple nav-like language selector at the top. Being fairly new to Episerver, I started looking into how I needed to build it out and what was involved. I found a bunch of information on Localization and Globalization, and it helped point me in the right direction, but there were some minor differences I found due to the age of the articles. Episerver has been updating pretty actively since version 7, so some of the information wasn't up to date.

After putting together my solution, I wanted to share it and point out a few things I encountered along the way. This post is my attempt at adding some updated information while working with Episerver 9.x and how I built our language selector.