In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a custom dynamic property in Episerver. A client, had a requirement for a user to be able to dynamically add different forms onto a page. The best way to do this within v6 is via dynamic controls. Within any rich-text editor, a dynamic control can be added by content editors. By creating custom dynamic controls, content editors can add custom 'things' onto a page. Dynamic controls can be thought of as adding components to a page.
The issue with hardcoding dynamic control values within textboxes is that they become hard to manage in large sites. It's not easy to tell where a dynamic control is used. For this project, the site had thousands of pages. The content editor could drop forms anywhere, this posed a potential maintenance nightmare 😨😨😨
When an editor added a form, they would pick which one they wanted to render from a list. This would then hardcode the form ID into the text area. Forms were created and delete frequently. This meant that after a few months, the site would have contained a lot of controls dotted around the site in unknown areas with hardcoded IDs that no longer exist.
To create an easier to manage solution, I came up with a solution that involved using a dropped dynamic control that would generate a GUID. A content editor could then use that GUID in a separate system in the Episerver admin to associate a list of controls against the guid. When a page loaded, a look-up would be made to render the things. If the control had no matching buckets, it would not render out anything. Solving my problem.
To build this control, you will need to create a dynamic control as normal, however, with one change :
In DynamicContentPlugIn, add a Url and Area attribute. The Url needs to point to a user control that inherits from DynamicContentEditControl. Next, create the user control that will be used as our custom setting display. All this control will do is, on creation, automatically create a Guid and display it:
When inheriting from DynamicContentEditControl, you need to implement the PrepareForSave method. In PrepareForSave you need to save the data so it can be used in the display control. This is done using Control.Properties[].Value:
One thing to note is that Content will be null if you try to use it in the constructor. Everything else should be pretty standard. On page creation, check if a GUID exists for that page, if it does... use it. Otherwise, create it.
As always, here's the code to download. Happy Coding 🤘
