Stop Creating New Windows & Tabs When Debugging

By default, Visual Studio launches web applications in a new browser window when debugging. It also closes your browser window when you stop. While I prefer publishing my web applications locally, Optimizely runs well from Visual Studio, and it's easier to debug initialization modules and other items this way. However, when you want to leave the page or content open, this behaviour can get in the way. This is how you change that.

ContentArea with Groups of Personalized Content

Personalization is a powerful component in Episerver that can provide a cool, fresh, and tailored experience for users that visit your site. Leveraging different criteria and conditions in Epi, Visitor Groups provide a grouping mechanism for users to be served different content based on pages they've viewed, forms they've submitted, or campaigns they have arrived from, among various other criteria. It's a pretty nice piece of functionality that, if you haven't learned about yet, you should check out more about, here.

That said, Personalized Groups in Episerver serve content on a prioritized, top-down, first-match basis. That means a visitor is served the first matching content item that is tagged with a visitor group they're in. That also means you are limited to one piece of changing content per Personalized Group for a user. But I needed more, and here are the solutions I explored.

Content and Growth are the Focus at Episerver Ascend 2019

Each year Episerver organizes the Ascend conference to showcase achievements and accomplishments for the product, the company, and the community. They also layout their roadmap for the future. Each day kicks off with a keynote that is usually intriguing, thought-provoking, or inspirational. A series of breakout sessions, developer labs, and networking opportunities follow. It's a great way for developers, partners, customers, and Epi employees to connect and learn from each other's experiences in the Episerver market.

Now that Ascend 2019 is over, these are a few of my takeaways:

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.

Episerver Widgets Resources for Text, Labels, and Styles

I have been doing more component and widget building in Episerver lately, and I have been digging around trying to find references to labels and text being used in widgets or referenced in other areas. I had to dig around to find some things, and instead of continually digging next time I need them, I decided to add them here. I also came across the Episerver style guide in my search for information, so I added that here as well. If I come across other references I need to use in the future, I'll update this with them also.

So, to clarify, this is really here to make it easier for me to find things I need in the future, but if you need this information and find it helpful, it's here for you too.

Replacing HTML strings with Dojo TemplatedMixin

I've been playing around with Dojo a bit recently, modifying some Episerver widgets, and extending functionality, and I ran into a scenario I wasn't really satisfied with. In one situation I encountered, I needed to supply an HTML string for a widget to utilize when rendering data for an object, but the HTML markup had some conditions to it based on the object I was on at the time. Another situation involved looping through items and adding them to a list for display in a widget, again needing to include data from the object in the markup.

I searched online for how to parse HTML strings to include object data or conditions in it, but I didn't find the kind of answer I wanted. Many of the examples online show HTML strings in the Dojo script using concatenation for adding the variables, and others involved multiple lines of node creation and dom manipulation using "dojo.place" and "domConstruct". If you want easily adjustable markup using a template approach, avoiding modifying your dojo JS, these techniques are not the most user friendly. However, I did discover a solution.

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.