Developer's Guide - EPiServer World

Extending EPiServer Community | 123
3 Extending EPiServer Community
3.1 Extending EPiServer Community classes
This tutorial describes howto create a derived class with custom attributes, and that exposes those attributes as fixed
properties in the derived class. This is in many cases a more elegant approach than accessing the attributes directly via
the attribute name.
In this tutorial we assume that we have a community implementation that requires the EntryComment class in Blog to
have an ImageGallery connected to it, where users can upload pictures when commenting an Entry. One way of
accomplishing this would of course be to just add an attribute to the EntryComment as described in section 2.5 and be
done with it. However, there is a more elegant way to use attributes without the need of keeping track of the attribute
names in your ASP.NET page.
We start by creating a new class derived from EntryComment.
using System.Collections.Generic;
using StarCommunity.Modules.Blog;
using StarCommunity.Modules.ImageGallery;
namespaceMyCommunity
{
//Inherit the EntryComment class
public class MyEntryComment : EntryComment
{
// The constructor takes DbDataReader and passes it to base class
public MyEntryComment(DbDataReader reader) : base(reader) { }
// Define the ImageGallery property for get and set
public ImageGallery ImageGallery
{
get{return this.getAttributeValue("attr_ig");}
set{blog.entity.SetAttributeValue("attr_ig",value));}
}
}
}
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