String Writer

In most cases, you will not be publishing the binary files (images/css/js) in the same location of where you publish pages. As a good practice, these external files will be stored in separate folders. In such cases, you will need to  specify path (relative) in the page DWT template.

Generally external css files will be declared like

<link href="/styles/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

This would work only if you have styles folder immediately after server path.

http://<server>/styles/main.css

In Tridion, default publication URL is “/” but if you have specified any path in the Publication,  you will need to append that path also. It should be accessed like.

http://<server>/<pub url>/styles/main.css

The below C# TBB will get the publication URL of the current publication.

//gets the current session object
 Session session = engine.GetSession();
 //gets page object from the package
 Item item = package.GetByType(ContentType.Page);
 //gets TcmUri object of Page
 TcmUri tcmObj = new TcmUri(item.GetValue("ID"));
 //generate tcm string format with publication id
 string publicationId = string.Format("tcm:0-{0}-1", tcmObj.PublicationId);
 //gets publication object from the current session
 Publication publication = new Publication(new TcmUri(publicationId), session);
 //writes the publication URL into the package
 package.PushItem("PublicationUrl", package.CreateStringItem(ContentType.Text, publication.PublicationUrl));

As you aware, variable “PublicationUrl” will be included in the package so this variable is accessible when you include this TBB on your page template.
Now you need to call this variable on the page DWT like below,

<link href="@@PublicationUrl@@/styles/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>

In C#, the general usage to identify the object type is using “is” keyword. This is okay to some extent but you have to write “switch” of “if”, for multiple types. If there are more object types, code will be lengthy. Recently I came across a easy way of checking the object’s type. This is helpful when the object is of COM type.

Just add the below reference in your project and call its TypeName method.

using Microsoft.VisualBasic;
.
.
.
.
.
public string GetTypeOf(object obj)
{
   return Microsoft.VisualBasic.Information.TypeName(obj);
}

Output:

This was very handy for me in my migration project where I needed to write all the object details in log file.

In simple applications or pages, handling an exception will not be a difficult task. But when your application is using any web services or threading, most of the time, actual exception details will be stored in InnerException of the main Exception object. In such cases, we need to iterate all the inner exceptions to get the actual error message.

Here is a code snippet to iterate all inner exceptions from the root Exception object.

private List<string> GetAllErrMessages(Exception ex)
{
   List<string> messages = new List<string>();
   //assign the current exception as first object and then loop through its
   //inner exceptions till they are null
   for(Exception eCurrent = ex.Exception; eCurrent != null; eCurrent = eCurrent.InnerException)
   {
      messages.Add(eCurrent.Message);
   }
}

My team said they never saw any code like handling Exception objects using for loop. I don’t know but I learnt this from my lead when I was working on Adrenalin HRMS product. Just sharing the code for your review

One of the most-wanted requirement from all customers is that notifying users through email. When they have some level of approvers to approve the content before they get published, the current user or next level approvers can be notified via mail.

I’ve earlier done this same implementation in ASP.Net & MOSS but Tridion is bit different. Sending mail is no different than traditional C# way. C# is to write mail related code and VB Script is to invoke it. Thats it…

Tridion allows this implementation in 3 simple steps. This simple example is just to understand its process… other business logics can be included later according to our requirements.

Implementation

1) Create custom dll using C#

2) Create workflows using Visio

3) Define workflow actions using VB Script

1) Create Custom dll using C#

Assuming that you now have fair idea about developing custom assemblies in Tridion. I’m starting directly with a code snippet.

Let’s create a custom class to define a C# method which has mailing piece of code.

namespace WorkFlow
{

  [System.Runtime.InteropServices.ComVisible(true)]
  [System.Runtime.InteropServices.ProgId("WCMReq.WorkflowSamples")]
  public class MailUtility
  {

     public bool NotifyUser(object workItem)
     {

        try
        {
           If(workItem is Component)
           {
               Component comp = (Component)workItem;
               String message = “Current approval level of “ + comp.Title + “ is “ + comp.ApprovalStatus.Position;
               return SendMail(message);
           }
           return false;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
           WriteLog(ex.Message);
        }
     }

     private bool SendMail(string message)
     {
       …
     }
  }
}

2) Create workflows using Visio

Assuming that you are already defined workflows using Visio Tridion extention.

3) Define workflow actions using VB Script

Open any workflow automatic action and include the following VB Script code.

Dim workobj
Set workobj= CreateObject("WCMReq.WorkflowSamples")
workobj.NotifyUser(CurrentWorkItem.GetItem())
Set workobj= Nothing

In my earlier post, I had published COM Deployer which is just to copy the dlls into Tridion System. Here I’m briefing the source code of the tool …

Namespaces:

using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.IO;
using COMAdmin;

All these are common .Net namespaces excep COMAdmin. For this , you need to include Interop.COMAdmin.dll reference. This is common dll which is provided by Microsoft to access COM services on Windows OS. More details on this can be found in MSDN.

But if you don’t have time to go through all these stuffs, you can simply copy the file from the following directory on any Windows OS J

%windir%/System32/com/comadmin.dll

Configuration Entries:

I’ve stored these entries app.config file. Hope I don’t need to explain more about these configuration entries.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <!--COM Service Name ex) "Tridion Content Manager" -->
    <add key="application" value="Tridion Content Manager"/>
    <!--Server name or IP where COM services are installed -->
    <add key="server" value="192.168.0.2"/>
    <!--Source file location (local/remote shared path), including file name & use ; to include multiple files-->
    <add key="sourceFiles" value="D:\Training\SDL Tridion\wkflw.dll;D:\Training\SDL Tridion\evntSystem.dll "/>
    <!--Target file location (local), without file name-->
    <add key="targetLocation" value="C:\Program Files\Tridion\bin"/>
  </appSettings>
</configuration>

Source Code:

//read config entries to local variables
string server = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["server"];
string application = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["application"];
string sourceFiles = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["sourceFiles"];
string targetLocation = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["targetLocation"];

COMAdminCatalog is the root object to access the sevice. Please note that the user must be having admin access to run this tool otherwise you will get Access Denied error.

COMAdminCatalog catalog = new COMAdminCatalogClass();
//connecting to server to access COM services
catalog.Connect(server);
//stopping service
catalog.ShutdownApplication(application);

COMAdminCatalog is an interface so we need to instantiate with COMAdminCatalogClass object.

//copy file to target location
File.Copy(file, targetLocation + "\\" + file.GetFileName(), true);

Just copying the source files to target location.

//restarting service
catalog.StartApplication(application);

After copied all the files, the services will be restarted by calling StartApplication method.

Sub methods:

Other private methods used in this utility…

/// <summary>
/// Method to write the output to the user
/// </summary>
/// <param name="message"></param>
private static void WriteMessage(string message)
{
    Console.WriteLine(Environment.NewLine + message);
}

public static class FileExtentionClass
{
  /// <summary>
  /// This extention method will be accessible from any string object.
  /// Intention is to retrieve the file name alone from the file path
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="filePath">file path of string type</param>
  /// <returns>file name of string type</returns>
  public static string GetFileName(this string filePath)
  {
      return filePath.Substring(filePath.LastIndexOf("\\") + 1);
  }
}

In my earlier post, we have seen about adding keywords. After that I was trying to add child keywords in the same code sample. But things didn’t work out when it comes to add parent details. Because you can’t assign multiple parents to a keyword if you use Tridion GUI  but it is possible if you use Tridion Object Model. Finally after some trial and errors, I got the working piece of code.

If you are trying to import large data into Tridion, you can modify this code using recursion. I assume that you are familiar with .Net programming so I don’t want to confuse this code sample by adding recursion. This simple code is about adding child keyword to a parent.

When you are adding the child keywords, you need to make four changes in my previous code.

1) Instantiate Category object to fetch parent key object

2) Get Parent keyword object

3) IsRoot – should be set to false as this is not a root keyword

4) Should include <tcm:ParentKeyword> within <tcm:ParentKeywords> as shown below

//initializing tridion base object

TDSE TObj = new TDSE();

//creating category object

Category catObj = (Category)TObj.GetObject(CategoryTCMURI, EnumOpenMode.OpenModeEdit, PublicationTCMURI, XMLReadFilter.XMLReadAll);

Keyword parentKey = catObj.GetKeywordByTitle("India");

//getting new Tridion keyword object

//CategoryTCMURI - TCM uri of category object

//PublicationTCMURI - TCM uri of publication

Keyword KObj = (Keyword)TObj.GetNewObject(ItemType.ItemTypeKeyword, CategoryTCMURI, PublicationTCMURI);

string title = "Chennai";

string description = "Chennai is the 4th largest metro";

string key = "Chennai";

bool isAbstract = false;

bool isRoot = false;

StringBuilder keyXML = new StringBuilder();

keyXML.Append("<tcm:Keyword xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0'>");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:Data xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0'>");

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:Title>{0}</tcm:Title>", title);

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:Description>{0}</tcm:Description>", description);

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:Key>{0}</tcm:Key>", key);

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:IsAbstract>{0}</tcm:IsAbstract>", isAbstract.ToString().ToLower());

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:IsRoot>{0}</tcm:IsRoot>", isRoot.ToString().ToLower());

keyXML.Append("<tcm:ParentKeywords xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0' xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink' >");

if (parentKey != null)

{

string info = parentKey.Info.Path;

info = info.Replace(" ", "%20");

info = info.Replace("\\", @"/");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:ParentKeyword xlink:type='simple' xlink:title='" + parentKey.Title + "' xlink:href='/webdav" + parentKey.Info.Path + "/" + parentKey.Title + ".tkw' /> ");

}

keyXML.Append("</tcm:ParentKeywords>");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:RelatedKeywords xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0' xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink' />");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:MetadataSchema xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink' xlink:type='simple' xlink:title='' xlink:href='tcm:0-0-0' />");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:Metadata />");

keyXML.Append("</tcm:Data>");

keyXML.Append("</tcm:Keyword>");

KObj.UpdateXML(keyXML.ToString());

KObj.Save(true);

Here’s the output

Last week I had a chance to work on a custom tool to create Tridion keywords. I started doing some POCs using Tridion business connecter but it failed so I tried again with Object Model (TOM). I was sure that this could be done through object model but there were no much details available in Tridion materials. We had tried various options but finally support team have helped us to find a quick way to add keywords.

Solution:

Keywords can be created/edited by updating its intermediate xml. But I don’t have a complete knowledge on this intermediate xml format as Tridion is using this for internal processing. But it worked for creating keywords.

Here’s a sample C# code to create a keyword in Tridion…

//initializing tridion base object

TDSE TObj = new TDSE();

//getting new Tridion keyword object

//CategoryTCMURI - TCM uri of category object

//PublicationTCMURI - TCM uri of publication

Keyword KObj = (Keyword)TObj.GetNewObject(ItemType.ItemTypeKeyword, CategoryTCMURI, PublicationTCMURI);

string title = "Books";

string description = "Tamil Books";

string key = "Books";

bool isAbstract = false;

bool isRoot = true;

StringBuilder keyXML = new StringBuilder();

keyXML.Append("<tcm:Keyword xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0'>");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:Data xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0'>");

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:Title>{0}</tcm:Title>", title);

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:Description>{0}</tcm:Description>", description);

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:Key>{0}</tcm:Key>", key);

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:IsAbstract>{0}</tcm:IsAbstract>", isAbstract.ToString().ToLower());

keyXML.AppendFormat("<tcm:IsRoot>{0}</tcm:IsRoot>", isRoot.ToString().ToLower());

keyXML.Append("<tcm:ParentKeywords xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0' xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink' />");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:RelatedKeywords xmlns:tcm='http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0' xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink' />");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:MetadataSchema xmlns:xlink='http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink' xlink:type='simple' xlink:title='' xlink:href='tcm:0-0-0' />");

keyXML.Append("<tcm:Metadata />");

keyXML.Append("</tcm:Data>");

keyXML.Append("</tcm:Keyword>");

KObj.UpdateXML(keyXML.ToString());

KObj.Save(true);

Note:

Lowercase values should be assigned isRoot & isAbstract.

During my migration we came across a situation where we need SID but all we had only LDAP user name. So after few trail and error googling, below code snippet helped us to get SID from LDAP user name.

/// <summary>
/// Gets the name of the SID by account.
/// <summary>
/// <param name="accountName"> Name of the account.</param>
/// <returns>SID</returns>
public string GetSIDByAccountName(string accountName)
{
   //name should be in the format of domain\username
   WindowsIdentity userIdentity = new WindowsIdentity(accountName);
   if (userIdentity == null)
      throw new Exception(string.Format("{0} : User does not exists", accountName));

   return userIdentity.User.AccountDomainSid.ToString();
}

Output : S-1-5-21-789336058-507921405-854245398-9938