Monday, 14 July 2008

Missing features of EPiServer

In our everyday work we encounter from time to time missing "things" in EPiServer which would make our life easier. I think it's worth talking about this stuff to let EPiServer team know that there is something on our wish list :)
Sometimes it can be something really small and relatively easy to add. I have something like this -- I would like to be able to add my configuration options to custom properties.

Here is how the edit property page looks like at the moment:



All what I'm asking for is a possibility to define new fields on this page, maybe in the same way as we can define custom plugin properties ...



[PlugInProperty(Description = "Some nice description", AdminControl = typeof(TextBox))]
public string CustomProperty
{
get { return customProperty; }
set { customProperty= value; }
}



Why I need it?

Well, whenever you are building more sophisticated properties, usually you want to make them reusable and that's when you need to have a way to configure it. Having that possibility, you can have different configuration for each page type.

You need a real life example? Here it comes ... we all use and love multipage property. But the truth is that adding multiple pages to the selection can be very annoying. To add additional page to the list every time you have start from root and browse down. It would be so much nicer if we could configure start page for this property isn't it? Adam was writing about this issue some time ago.

Sometimes small changes make big difference, do you have more examples/requests like this?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally agree!! There should be a way to configure your props like this.

Anonymous said...

It would be a really nice feature. I think it has been requested for a while, but it seems hard to implement. :( In some cases I use the help-text field to add settings. It may not be that pretty, but it works.

You can se an example here: http://antecknat.se/blog/2008/06/25/multipage-property-to-episerver-5/

Unknown said...

Yes, this is a long requested feature. There are so many use cases for this. In addition to your multi-page one:

- Define items in a select box list
- Only select a specific page type (like erik said)
- Only select from a page below a certain node (again like erik said)
- Only select files from a specific folder
- Only select a file of a give type
- Max lengths on strings
- Regex validation on strings
- Define a valid range for numbers
- Select a user from a specific group
- Select categories below a certain node

And I can't imagine that it would be hard to implement considering that in a way it's actually already implemented for one property type, the LongString one.

To really make it simple I think a single text field in the PageDefinition table in the database together with the ability to define the control to use to enter this string. This would get you a long way.

If EPiServer could keep improving the core product in this kind of way it would be so awesome! Pretty Please!

Anonymous said...

I agree! I have this on my wish list, too!