Book Image

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server

Book Image

Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server

Overview of this book

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is a dynamic web publishing system with which you can build websites quickly and cost-efficiently. MCMS provides the administration, authoring, and data management functionality, and you provide the website interface, logic, and workflow. Once your website is up and running, your content contributors can add and edit content on their own, without the need to work with developers or the IT department. First time developers of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 face a relatively steep learning curve. Not only are they expected to be conversant in the Microsoft .NET Framework, they are also required to be familiar with the concepts of MCMS 2002. Many beginners to MCMS start out by looking at the example site that ships with the product; tweaking it, dissecting it and turning it inside out using the obscure code comments as markers. However, when it comes to starting their own website from scratch, many are baffled ? where do they begin? This book exists to answer that question; teaching the essential concepts of MCMS 2002 in a clear, straightforward and practical manner. Containing answers to some of the most asked questions in developer newsgroups, this book is a treasure trove of tricks and tips for solving the problems faced by MCMS developers. This is a unique resource focused exclusively on the needs of developers using MCMS. It doesn?t waste time and pages on user or administrator level information that is well covered in other documentation. It?s a distillation of practical experience that developers need to get results, fast. The authors carefully structured example project complements and extends the knowledge gained from an initial look at the examples that ship with MCMS.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction

Accessing Placeholder Content


We have seen how to retrieve specific postings using the classes in the Microsoft.ContentManagement.Publishing namespace. To get at the content stored within a posting, we need to use another namespace, Microsoft.ContentManagement.Extensions.Placeholders.

In Chapter 7, we added placeholders to the PlantCatalog template. We created plant fact sheets based on the Plant template and stored content within its placeholders. Now, let's use the PAPI to read and display the stored content. The available placeholders found in each plant fact sheet are:

  • ResearchPaper (AttachmentPlaceholder)

  • Description (HtmlPlaceholder)

  • PlantPicture (ImagePlaceholder)

In order to access the placeholder content, we first create a drop-down list containing a list of all our postings. When the Get Fact Sheet Content button is clicked, we retrieve the contents of the placeholders of the selected posting. This is an interesting example because it shows you how to iterate through a collection of...