Contents tagged with Orchard
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Stubbing the Orchard content manager
I’ve shown in the previous post how to build fake content items for testing purposes. When the code being tested gets content items from the content manager, however, you will also need a stub for the content manager, so your code receives fake content items that you have prepared, and not real ones from the database.
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Faking Orchard content items for testing
When testing Orchard modules, it’s often necessary to build fake content items that will be usable by your code, but won’t be database-bound. For this purpose, I’ve built a number of stubs and helpers over the years that enable most scenarios to work using fake content items. Because everything in Orchard is based off interfaces and dependency injection, mocking is rarely necessary, and a few good stubs are often all you need.
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My TechEd Europe talk on Orchard is online
I spent a lot of time on planes last week (which explains why I haven’t posted anything), on my way to Barcelona, where Microsoft had invited me to talk on the .NET Open Source Showcase. It was a great experience and opportunity, and I hope I did justice to Orchard in the time I had to present it. I focused on what makes Orchard a success story, and how to reproduce that success on other open source projects.
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Identity in Orchard Import/Export
Orchard has a really neat concept of identity that’s mainly used when importing contents into the CMS. One of the difficulties with importing contents is that you need to make sure that you can import not just new items, but also updates to existing items. For this to work consistently, we need to be able to identify a content item reliably.
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Opting out of anti-forgery validation in Orchard
Anti-forgery tokens are a very important security feature of ASP.NET MVC and Orchard. Most of the time, you should keep them in place, and just let the system work its magic. There are a few rare situations however where it’s not the appropriate protection and you’ll want to disable it. Being too lazy to include the token in your ajax requests or your forms is of course not one of those situations.
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Reducing coupling with dynamic languages
I’m learning Node currently, after years of doing ASP.NET MVC, and a bit of Python on a couple of projects. There are lots of habits to shake off, and there are things that I miss (such as ASP’s outstanding model binding), but there is also a very liberating power in JavaScript, that lets you do things in a much more straightforward and even cleaner way than you would otherwise. There’s a lot less ceremony, and you can focus on what counts. One thing that keeps astonishing me is how I can make my Node modules work together without coupling them.
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WebAPI actions in Orchard
Building WebAPI controllers in Orchard is fairly simple: just inherit from System.Web.Http.ApiController. You’ll then be able to inject dependencies exactly in the same way that you would anywhere in Orchard. WebAPI is designed so that the default behavior is that a controller represents a category of resources, such as a product, an article, etc. There’s a bunch of conventions in place so that just naming the methods on the controllers is enough to wire them up. If this REST-like behavior is what you’re after, that’s great, just apply the conventions and you’re good to go. If you need to stray from that model, and implement something closer to what you’d do with a regular MVC controller, you’ll need to do a little more work.
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Building a WebAPI route in Orchard
There’s a number of differences between regular MVC controllers and WebAPI controllers that make the latter much more suitable to building APIs: they are REST-centric, they can negotiate the format of the answer, etc. Implementing WebAPI controllers in Orchard is really simple. First, you need a route, and that will be the subject of this post.
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Cleanly getting a WebAPI action URL
Whenever you need to get the URL of a ASP.NET MVC action, you should use Url.Action (where URL is an instance of UrlHelper), and never hard-code the URL. This way, the URL is dynamically constructed from the available information in the Url.Action parameters and in the route table. If the route is changed, the results of the Url.Action call will change accordingly, and everything will continue to work. The same principles, of course, apply to WebAPI actions.
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Adding dependencies that don’t implement IDependency to Orchard
There are rare cases where you’ll want to be able to inject instances of classes that don’t implement IDependency. One example of this can be found in MvcModule in Orchard.Framework, which also provides a good example of how to do it. The idea is to derive from Module, and override the Load method to register factories for the types you want to expose: