joeaudette
commented
6 years ago This is another excellent request and is a problem I've had many discussions about and actually already put a lot of thought into an implementation design that I will elaborate on here to see if you think it meets your needs.
This is another thing I would like to implement but it is non-trivial and will take some time investment. I would probably eventually get to it on my own time but it would be ideal if we could work out some financial sponsorship for the development effort to make it a priority and deliver it in the near future.
This is something I think we only need for Pages, not Blog posts.
Implementation Design Plan
Envisioned User Experience
We want to keep the existing simple way to just directly create and edit content that we already have but allow for more helpful ways to edit content so that it can be formatted any way we want it without the user having to do work to achieve the layout. So the idea would start with introducing a new icon next to the current icons for new page and edit page, the new icon would be for "New Page From Template", and clicking that the user would be presented with a list of available templates with names and descriptions and would be able to click one of those to get started. It would possible via configuration to plugin additional custom templates that would be available in the list, and the custom templates could be globally available or tenant specific. The template would provide a custom editing experience with any number of custom fields and html editors for as many different parts as needed so that it is clear to the user where to put things and the user doesn't have to worry about the final layout which the template will take care of.
Envisioned Implementation
A custom template would consist of:
- A model corresponding to a class, there can be some built in models but custom class models can be used in a plugged in custom template.
- A Razor view for editing the model
- A Razor view for rendering the model ie this is where the layout is handled so the user does not have to do layout and can't accidentally change layout, it can only be changed by a developer editing the Razor view
The Page class and table would get some additional fields initially populated based on the template to capture the following:
- The serialized model
- The serializer used to serialize the model. I'm thinking json would be the default but xml could be supported in case that has some advantages for querying in sql server for example.
- The template id/unique key
For editing we will obtain the following information by looking up the template with the template key
- The type of the model
- The name of the edit razor view, and any edit scripts and css
- The name of the render razor view
The presence of data in the above fields is how the code would know how to orchestrate the editing and rendering process. If not populated then it is just a normal content page. The edit link will just link to the normal edit page but will be redirected to a new controller action for editing templated pages if the page has a template specified.
At edit time if those fields have data then the model would be deserialized and the template edit razor view would be used to edit the model. Upon save the serialized model would be updated and possibly the render view could be used to pre-render the content into the existing main content field. This needs a little investigation because we currently do this for email with razor but that uses a layout file and renders a full html document whereas what we would want here is to just render an html fragment with a partial view. We can propbably manage this by using an empty layout file with page template render views. Alternatively we can just render the page on each request by deserializing the model and passing it to the render view partial.
There would be standard models and interfaces for defining the template itself and these would be defined and plugged in via appsettings.json and deserialized from there to produce the list of templates that the user can choose from. Something along the lines of this json:
"ContentTemplateConfig": {
"Templates": [
{
"TenantId": "*",
"UniqueKey": "someuniquevalue",
"Title": "Some title",
"Description": "Some description to help the user pick the template",
"ModelType": "some fully qualified model type",
"EditView": "The name of the edit razor view file",
"RenderView": "The name of the render razor view file"
"EditScripts" : [
{
"Url" : "/somefile.js",
"Environment" : "any",
"Sort" : "1"
}
],
"EditCss" : [
{
"Url" : "/somefile.css",
"Environment" : "any",
"Sort" : "1"
}
]
},
{
"TenantId": "*",
"UniqueKey": "someotheruniquevalue",
"Title": "Some other title",
"Description": "Some other description to help the user pick the template",
"ModelType": "some fully qualified model type",
"EditView": "The name of the edit razor view file",
"RenderView": "The name of the render razor view file"
}
]
}The * would be used for TenantId to make a template globally available, and site id could be used to make it only available for a given site.
I will try to implement something re-useable as a helper to be able to derive the model from posted form fields. We may need to make it possible for a given template to plugin its own implementation to bind the model in case the default implementation doesn't meet the specific needs of the given template.
I think this would make a pretty open ended solution allowing developers to use arbitrary models and views that they create themselves.
Sample Templates to be included
I will implement and include a simple template that could be used for a Staff profile page with the scenario of one page per profile. The template will ensure that each page is formatted consistently.
I will try to implement a more complex template sample for managing a small list of Staff Profiles on a single page. This one will likely require some custom javascript and css, and some hidden field conventions for finding new items added to the list on postback. Possibly it will require implementing a template specific plugin to create the model from the posted form elements, but I will try to implement a generic solution first.
Time Estimate
Estimating is hard, I'm not good at it, things often take less or more time than expected, more often they take more time than I originally guess. Sometimes things go smoothly and progress rapidly, other times unanticipated challenges emerge.
My ballpark estimate for the main system is 2-4 weeks of effort. The more complex template example with custom javascript to manage a list could take 2-5 additional days after implementing the main system, but would be a valuable addition for other developers to model their own templates on.
CrispinF
It would be great to have a way of templating content, so that for any new page the web editor enters information into some controls on a form, and the entered values (which might include images) are rendered as html when not editing. The required ingredients for this are (as it seems to me!):
It would be most powerful if data entered through content templates became queryable "data" rather than just shaped html.