I'm very new to Umbraco and have a requirement to set up a site where different customers will access the same site, but see it with their own brand. It must be the same site in IIS and re-using the same razor views and related code, but our business teams have a requirement to set up a new customer for the same site, with their own values for the configurable content data via Umbraco without relying on support or developer involvement.
eg. Site URL is www.mysite.com
Customer from ClientA visits (maybe via URL www.mysite.com/ClientA or perhaps www.mysite.com?brand=ClientA) and sees the version branded for them.
A customer from ClientB should be able to visit the same site but passing in their brand code instead and see their customized version.
My first question is: Is this acheivable? If so, what is the correct way to do it?
I want to maximise code re-use.
Any help or pointers would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
You can do this is standard asp.net, add a code behind for the standard default.aspx page that umbraco uses to drive everything and then in the onpreinit event switch either the master page or theme to the correct branding; something like:
protected override void OnPreInit(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnPreInit(e);
int templateId = umbraco.NodeFactory.Node.GetCurrent().template;
umbraco.template template = new umbraco.template(templateId);
string templateName = template.TemplateAlias;
if (Request.QueryString["brand"] = "ClientA")
{
Page.MasterPageFile = string.format("~/MasterPages/clienta/{0}.master", templateName);
}
}
So all content is tagged to the standard set of masterpages in the masterpages folder; but if a "?brand=ClientA" url is requested it automatically changes the masterpage to the clienta folder - allowing you to brand the page based on the querystring.
Related
Using .net core 2.0 MVC, C#
I have an application in MVC that has a menu on the UI. One of the menu item contains the redirect to another application. So when user clicks on that item I make an redirect to another application within the same IIS.
So I wanted to know:
- What is the best approach to make an redirect to another application withing the same IIS. Basically to another controller and action in the target application.
- How can I pass some querystring params along the redirect. I want to pass a string value.
- On the target application whats the best place to grab the query string values?
Would appreciate inputs.
Thanks
Hosted on the same server or not, applications are separate entities. In other words, if you need to link to another website (whether it be one you control or not), you'll need to include the full absolute URL:
Click me!
There's no way to generate this as you could for a URL internal to your web app. You also simply construct the query string you want manually, since again, there's no way to generate this for a separate web app.
On the other side, this is just basic modelbinding. Generally speaking, any query string value can be bound directly to an action param of the same name. For example, with the address above, you'd just need an action like:
public IActionResult Index(string key)
Inside App1 View (cshtml):
Link
Inside app2 home controller
public ActionResult Test(string name)
{
//do whatever you want with name.
return View();
}
Quite new to Sitecore, I am building a Sitecore web application with no authentication (anonymous). It's a large project with lots of hierarchical top, side menus.
When the user revisits the website, I need load the page that was last visited with menu item highlighted. Could someone please help me whether there's any Sitecore API that provides this and if not what would be the ideal solution i.e. store last visited page on client cookie?
An option I can see would be storing the last visited page on client cookie like you said, then build in a custom processor and put it in the
<httpRequestBegin>
pipeline in the web.config.
A custom processor needs to inherit from the HttpRequestProcessor class, and you'd need to override the Process method.
What I would suggest in this case is having your custom processor like this:
<processor type="Your.NameSpace.ClassName, Your.Assembly" />
<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />
and have something like the following:
namespace Your.Namespace
{
public class ClassName : HttpRequestProcessor
{
public override void Process(HttpRequestArgs args)
{
// Get cookie:
var cookievalue = WebUtil.GetCookieValue("cookiename");
WebUtil.Redirect(cookievalue);
}
}
}
Of course this suggest you'll store the URL of the last visited page in the cookie. You could also store the ID of the last visited item in the cookie of course, and get it's path from there.
I just came across this article, and as Holder mentions, it should be possible to get the information from DMS if you have it enabled and are using it:
Get last visited pages from a Sitecore DMS (OMS) Profile
As far as I know, there isn't anything in the default API that does this.
There might be something in Sitecore OMS, but I don't know much about OMS.
I think a cookie, might be the easiest and simplest way of doing this.
I want to build a ASP.NET MVC site so that the controller for a specific url is stored in the database instead of the URL.
The reason for that is that i'm building a CMS system and the users should be able to change the template (controller) without changing the URL. I also think that the name of the controller is not relevant for the end users and i want clean URL:s.
I realise that i could just add all routes at application start, but for a system with like 100 000 pages it feels like a bad idea.
Is it possible to store the url:s in the database and make a lookup for each request and then map that request to a specific controller?
Basically you'll have to implement your own IRouteHandler.
Part of the answer and some example code is in Option 3 of this question's answer:
ASP.NET MVC custom routing for search
More information:
http://weblogs.asp.net/fredriknormen/archive/2007/11/18/asp-net-mvc-framework-create-your-own-iroutehandler.aspx
Why couldn't you just do something like this:
-- Global.asax.cs --
routes.MapRoute(null, // Route name
"content/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { Controller = "Content", Action = "Show", Id = (string) null }); // Parameter defaults
-- /Controllers/ContentController.cs --
public class ContentController : Controller
{
public ActionResult Show(string id)
{
// Lookup the 'content' (article, page, blog post, etc) in the repository (database, xml file, etc)
ContentRepository repository = new ContentRepository();
Content content = repository.FindContent(id);
return View(content);
}
}
Such that a request to your site www.yoursite.com/content/welcome-to-my-first-blog-post would call ContentController.Show("welcome-to-my-first-blog-post").
I suppose ASP.NET can do many of the same things as PHP. If so there is a simple approach.
With rewrite rules you can easily send any traffic to any URL of the 100K to the same place. On that destination you could simply use the server variables containing the URL requested by the client and extract the location. Look it up in the DB and send the corresponding data for that URL back to the client on-the-fly.
"for a system with like 100,000 pages it feels like a bad idea."
It is a bad idea if you are creating a routing system that cannot be reused. The basic {controller}/{action}/{id} schema points you in the direction of reuse. This schema can be extended/revamped/recreated according to your needs.
Instead of thinking about how many pages you have think about how your resources can be grouped.
Instead of creating a heavy routing system why not create an anchor link control (ascx) which allows user to only add valid internal links. Keep a table in the db of your templates and their controllers to populate the control with it.
We have a requirement to have our ASP.NET MVC websites be automatically closed down by a remote notification (change in database value). Where would be the best place to implement this?
Base Controller Class
Global.asax
Custom attribute
Other
Update
Lots of suggestions to use app_offline but this scenario will be happening daily and will be purely initiated by the database so I would rather have the application take the initiative rather than something external push the file in.
Also, I will probably need to redirect the users to a holding page (preferably an MVC controller method to keep everything consistent). I'm leaning more towards catching it in my BaseController and having that handle it
There's a standard way of "gracefully" terminating ASP.NET 2.0 webapp - just drop a App_Offline.htm to the root directory of your application. See this.
I would go with Global.asax Application_BeginRequest if you have to do it programmatically.
You could Response.Redirect the page to "Offline.aspx" which can retrieve a message from the database or whatever you need. Of course you'd have to look at the request to see if it was trying to get to "Offline.aspx" otherwise you'd end up in an infinite loop.
Or maybe all your applications can be redirected to a single website which would remove most the complication.
I'm going to answer this myself as I did it a different way but thanks to everyone for their responses.
What I ended up doing is overriding OnActionExecuting() in my BaseController class (which all my controllers derived from).
In this method I check the database (using a 1 minute cache) and if the website is closed I load up a view to display a closed message. Code shown below
Protected Overrides Sub OnActionExecuting(ByVal filterContext As System.Web.Mvc.ActionExecutingContext)
MyBase.OnActionExecuting(filterContext)
Dim _cfgService = ObjectFactory.GetInstance(Of IConfigService)()
If _cfgService.DynamicConfig.WebSiteClosed Then
filterContext.Result = ErrorHandler(_cfgService.DynamicConfig.WebSiteClosedTitle, _
_cfgService.DynamicConfig.WebSiteClosedMessage)
End If
End Sub
Handling this type of behavior in the Global.asax file sounds like the best solution and redirecting to a static "ofline/closed" page. Handle the request on the Application_BeginRequest method, check to see the the site is active, if it let it continue, if it is not online Response.Redirect the request to the static page.
protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string redirectURL = "~/Offline.aspx"; //some static page
bool isOnline = false; //SQL Call, config value
if (!isOnline && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(redirectURL))
{
Response.RedirectLocation = redirectURL;
Response.End();
}
}
Sorry, don't know about ASP.NET, but in case helpful:
We have a single APPLICATION.ASP page for our site (CMS / Database merge type stuff); this is possibly not common and therefore may therefore restrict usefulness, but could perhaps be implemented by an INCLUDE at the top of all ASPX files
We rename APPLICATION.ASP to TEST.ASP and copy HOLDING_PAGE.ASP to APPLICATION.ASP
The HOLDING_PAGE.ASP is present in the WWW folder, so always ready-and-available. It contains a "Site not available" message etc. and is self contained for all CSS (no include files, no DB access). Only exception is the company logo (which is external to that file, obviously)
This method prevents all access to the site, is not dependant on having a working DB connection, and allows us to change anything on the site without interfering with the holding page (apart from Company Logo, but changing that is likely to be benign)
We can still access the site, internally, using TEST.ASP - so we can test any new rollout features before removing the holding page and putting the site live. If you want to prevent anonymous use of TEST.ASP then deny anonymous permission.
Remove holding page is: Delete APPLICATION.ASP (i.e. the holding page) and Rename TEST.ASP to APPLICATION.ASP
We also have a database flag that causes the normal APPLICATION.ASP page to show a holding page - which we can use whilst doing more minor changes.
I'm experimenting with MVC, and my question is - where I had Page_Load logic in Master Pages with WebForms, where should it go in MVC? Here's the business case:
Different Host Headers should cause different Page Titles to be displayed on the site's (one) Master Page, therefore all pages. For example, if the host header is hello.mydomain.com, the page title should be "Hello World" for all pages/views, while goodbye.mydomain.com should be "Goodbye World" for all pages/views.
If the host header is different than anything I have in the list, regardless of where in the application, it should redirect to /Error/NoHostHeader.
Previously, I'd put this in the MasterPage Load() event, and it looks like in MVC, I could do this either in every controller (doesn't feel right to have to call this functionality in every controller), or somewhere in Global.asax (seems too... global?).
Edit: I have gotten this to work successfully using the Global.asax method combined with a Controller for actually processing the data. Only problem at this point is, all of the host header information is in a database. I would normally store the "tenant" information if you will in a Session variable and only do a DB call when it's not there; is there a better way to do this?
There is no 1:1 equivalent in MVC for a reason, let's just recapitulate how to think about it the MVC way:
Model: "Pages of this site are always requested in a certain context, let's call it the tenant (or user, topic or whatever your sub domains represent). The domain model has a property representing the tenant of the current request."
View: "Render the page title depending on the tenant set in the model."
Controller: "Set the tenant in the model depending on the host header".
Keep in mind that what we want to avoid is mixing controller, view and business logic. Having controller logic in more then one place or a place, that is not called "controller" is not a problem, as long as it remains separated.
And now the good thing: You could do this "MVC style" even with Web Forms, and the solution still works with ASP.NET MVC!
You still have the request lifecycle (not the page lifecycle), so you could implement a custom HttpModule that contains this part of the controller logic for all requests. It handles the BeginRequest event, checks for the host header, and stores the tenant to something like HttpContext.Current.Items["tenant"]. (Of course you could have a static, typed wrapper for this dictionary entry.)
Then all your model objects (or a model base class, or whatever is appropriate for your solution) can access the HttpContext to provide access to this information like this:
public string Tenant
{
get { return HttpContext.Current.Items["tenant"]; }
}
Advantages:
You have separated cause (host header) and effect (rendering page title), improving maintainability and testability
Therefore you could easily add additional behavior to your domain model based on this state, like loading content from the database depending on the current tenant.
You could easily make more parts of the view depend on the tenant, like CSS file you include, a logo image etc.
You could later change the controller logic to set the tenant in the model not only based on the sub domain, but maybe based on a cookie, a referrer, search term, user agent's language, or whatever you can think about, without modifying any of your code depending on the model.
Update re your edit: I don't like the idea of holding the state in the session, especially if your session cookie might apply not only to each sub domain, but to all domains. In this case you might serve inconsistent content if users visted another sub domain before. Probably the information in the database that is mapping host headers to tenants won't change very often, so you can cache it and don't need a database lookup for every request.
You could create a base controller that supplied the correct ViewData to your MVC Master Page View, then derive each of your actual controllers from that one. If you put the logic into the ActionExecuting method, you should be able to generate an exception or redirect to an error page if necessary.
You are thinking too "WebForms" and not enough MVC. A master page is just a wrapper of your view, and it should only contain layout html. You can send stuff to your master, but it's a one way road and you should strive for agnostic views. Bottom line: forget about the events that WebForms had as they aren't going to be used here.
Since you are dealing with Host headers I suppose you could put it in the Global.asax...great now I'm confused :P
Stolen code from http://forums.asp.net/t/1226272.aspx
protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string host = string.Empty;
if (this.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_HOST"] == this.Request.Url.DnsSafeHost)
{
host = this.Request.Url.DnsSafeHost;
}
else
{
Regex regex = new Regex("http://[^/]*.host/([^/]*)(/.*)");
Match match = regex.Match(this.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri);
if (match.Success)
{
host = match.Groups[1].Value;
Context.RewritePath(match.Groups[2].Value);
}
}
// Match the host with the portal in the database
...
}
What you need is here http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/passing-data-to-view-master-pages-cs