Is creating a front end group of pages possible?

Posted by Community Admin on 04-Aug-2018 15:03

Is creating a front end group of pages possible?

All Replies

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Nov-2013 00:00

Hey guys,
I created a module via sitefinity thunder, and looked into how they create a backend group of pages using the SiteInitializer.Installer. What I want to know is, is it possible to do this for the front end where SiteInitialize.Installer.CreateModuleGroupPage(...).PlaceUnder(...), Where I can target the PlaceUnder Method to point to a published page or better yet register my web user controls as a valid url's recognize by sitefinity. I know this can be done by creating a page and adding my widgets into the page and navigating from created pages to pages, but this just wont do(unless I don't have a choice).

Lets say I have a Documents module, this module has 3 different view, the index one list all my documents, and from this default view I can create a new document clicking the upload button and I can edit each created document by clicking the edit button. I want my widget to contain all this pages, just like in the back end pages when the user navigates to my default view... I just want to know if this option is possible otherwise I will have no choice but to clog all this 3 views into one ascx and create a complicated ConfigureControl method just to figure out what to show and what to hide depending on the clicks... the other option is to create 2 pages and create 2 widgets, then navigate using the 2 pages...(and my problem with this approach is by the time my site is ready, I will have 10000 pages containing different views that could have been minimize if I was able to register my user web controls as a valid url for sitefinity.

Thanks in advance,
Denes

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Nov-2013 00:00

Sounds like this is a great candidate for MVC.

http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/documentationarticles/developers-guide/sitefinity-essentials/using-asp.net-mvc-in-sitefinity

Using MVC will allow you to have a single "widget" but show different views based on the user interactions.  So if the can add a new document there would be a view correlating to that or editing and document etc.

Happy Coding! 

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Nov-2013 00:00

Thanks Jonathan,
We are actually a team that develop in MVC. Unfortunately, sitefinity is still lacking for pure mvc development(this was initially how we wanted to program). We decided to switch to web forms since sitefinity was mainly built for web forms and decided to wait it out until MVC gets further develop.

Denes

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Nov-2013 00:00

What do you feel it is lacking to accomplish your task at hand?

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Nov-2013 00:00

Well, its inappropriate to be discussing that in this post, but these are the few issues we had. There is the issue on creating modules(without using sitefinity module builder, if we do use sitefinity module builder, the behind the scene needs to use dynamic module manager, we then need to recreate the model just so we can have the correct model container...), Sitefinity Thunder does a good job on creating scaffolds for custom modules(scaffolds views are in webforms, not a big deal anyway. The issue with this is  MVC needs to sit on the MVC folder on the main solution, thus giving us problem with reusing widgets...), and the fact that routing your methods from different controllers get complicated. We did send a ticket to support with most of our issues, we are just awaiting their replies.

Posted by Community Admin on 13-Nov-2013 00:00

I found a this documentation, If anyone is kind of on the same issue:
www.sitefinity.com/.../creating-the-frontend-view

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