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

Automating Deployment Using the Site Deployment API


On certain occasions, it's perfectly normal to have someone sitting in front of the server, clicking buttons, exporting and importing objects across MCMS databases. However, it wouldn't be productive to do that when you have regular incremental updates to the site.

MCMS provides an option to create scripts for incremental updates to allow automatic deployment using the Site Deployment API (SDAPI). With the SDAPI, we can write scripts that automate the process of exporting objects from the source server and importing them on the destination server.

The SDAPI is packaged as a COM-based application programming interface. There are two sets of objects in the SDAPI:

  • Objects that support server-side site deployment. Scripts built on this API are executed on the source MCMS server for exports and destination MCMS server for imports. The required library file is located at: <install directory>\server\bin\NRSiteDeployServer.dll.

  • Objects that...