External Data Sources - Sitefinity - Front- & Back-End Development

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Posted by Community Admin on 28-Oct-2015 00:00

I have what I think is a unique situation, but need to give some background on our project first.

We are using SiteFinity (8.0 currently) as a "shell" for a whole host of custom widgets we have created. These custom widgets are created as normal .NET MVC components and "widgetized" into SiteFinity as embedded resources that get compiled into a widgets.dll that is referenced inside of the SiteFinity codebase. All these custom widgets end up in custom toolbox categories and are drag and droppable just like the other widgets inside SiteFinity. Alongside these MVC components is a completely separated database where the custom widget's data resides. (Our project gathers a quite extensive amount of school and student data from various districts across our state and puts them into a standardized operational data store based on the CEDS standard. By doing this, we can update SiteFinity and CEDS products independent of each other, and run no risk of "breaking" either component in the process since they are separate. Any customization of the CEDS schema is done in extension tables, so both SiteFinity and CEDS remain purely as "off the shelf" products that are not inherently customized from a code and database perspective.)

Having said all that, I was wondering if it was possible to access and use data from this external CEDS data source within SiteFinity, such as building a custom module via the module builder?

One easy example I have it that I need to extend (or create a new) News widget and would like to use the SiteFinity News widget and extend it to be able to audience news items to specific school districts. To do this, I would need to be able to connect to our CEDS database and reference the school districts tables.

Thanks in advance for any insight anyone can give. I am open to any possible suggestions on how to tackle this!

Posted by Community Admin on 05-Nov-2015 00:00

You can create a custom provider for news. This would allow you to change where it was stored. I don't know of any working examples of

news but there are quite a few for images out there the concept would be the same.

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