Changes to Page Objects API in CMS 6 Release

The upcoming final release of CMS 6 will introduce a couple of small changes in the way you load and save Page Objects compared to the RC1 version.

Following feedback and a few bug fixes we decided that mixing Page Objects with PageData and having to go through the DataFactory to save them was not going to work and was not the cleanest API.

This blogpost explains the RC1 way of doing things. In the rest of this post I will go through how to work with Page Objects in the CMS Release version.

The main class you will be interested in is the EPiServer.Core.PageObjectManager which can be found in the EPiServer.dll assembly. The most likely places you will be working with Page Objects are in a CMS Page Template, a CMS User Control or from Dynamic Content. In all 3 cases the PageData object is available and therefore the PageObjectManager takes a PageData in its constructor (there are other constructers available for other scenarios when PageData is not available). This tells the PageObjectManager to load and save Page Objects in the context of that page.

You can load Page Objects like this:

   1: PageData pageData = // Obtain the PageData instance to work with

   2:  

   3: // Construct a PageObjectManager with the PageData

   4: PageObjectManager pom = new PageObjectManager(pageData);

   5:  

   6: Rating rating = pom.Load<Rating>("Rating");

   7:  

   8: if (rating != null)

   9: {

  10:     // Do something with the rating

  11: }

You can also load all Page Objects for the page like this:

   1: PageData pageData = // Obtain the PageData instance to work with

   2:  

   3: // Construct a PageObjectManager with the PageData

   4: PageObjectManager pom = new PageObjectManager(pageData);

   5:  

   6: var objects = pom.LoadAll();

   7:  

   8: // Get the Rating object

   9: Rating rating = objects.ItemAs<Rating>("Rating");

  10:  

  11: if (rating != null)

  12: {

  13:     // Do something with the rating

  14: }

Note that the LoadAll method returns an IDictionary. The ItemAs<> method is an extension method added as part of the Page Objects implementation to obtain the object in a typed way.

Saving a Page Object is also straight forward:

   1: PageData pageData = // Obtain the PageData instance to work with

   2:  

   3: // Construct a PageObjectManager with the PageData

   4: PageObjectManager pom = new PageObjectManager(pageData);

   5:  

   6: Rating rating = pom.Load<Rating>("Rating");

   7:  

   8: // Update the rating or create a new one if null

   9:  

  10: // Save it back

  11: pom.Save("Rating", rating);

There is another overload of Save which takes a OwnerOption. I will go into this in more detail in a later blog post.

What all this means is that if you have already started building sites with CMS 6 RC1 and have used Page Objects you will unfortunately need to make these small codes changes for obtaining and saving Page Objects. If anybody also needs to preserve their Page Object instances between RC1 and the release version then please email me paul smith episerver com and I will provide you will a small script to do this.