Month: April 2016

Getting the YouTube ECL Connector to work with DXA

Ryan Durkin, , , , , , , Leave a comment

I successfully hooked up the YouTube ECL Connector into Tridion 2013 SP1 a while ago without any problems but it’s taken up until now for me to build the functionality to render out the YouTube videos in DXA.

I thought this was going to be easy but once again I couldn’t find any steps in the documentation on how to do this so I thought I would show you how I did it.

My first thought was to temporarily extend the Item List schema to add in a Multimedia field called eclTest that allowed my ExternalContentLibraryStubSchema-youtube Multimedia Schema.

I then extended the ItemList Model with a new property mapping to my new field and used created as a type of EclItem (which is built in to DXA 1.2)

[SemanticProperty("s:eclTest")]
 public EclItem EclTest { get; set; }

I opened the Component and updated the Ecl Test field to point towards a YouTube ECL video.

I then published the Publish Settings Page which contains the schema field definitions as well as publishing the Home Page which contains this updated Component.

I then updated my view to render out the new field: @Model.EclTest.Url

I then ran my local DXA web application but it unfortunately blew up:

ERROR - Unable to map field 'eclTest' to property of type 'Sdl.Web.Common.Models.EclItem'.
 Sdl.Web.Common.DxaException: Unable to map field 'eclTest' to property of type 'Sdl.Web.Common.Models.EclItem'. ---> System.MissingMethodException: Cannot create an abstract class.

What I didn’t realise is that the EclItem class is an abstract class and what I needed to do is to create a new class that Inherited from ECLItem and update my ItemList Model to use that type. Rick explained this over on Stack Exchange.

So I created a public class called YouTubeEclItem and then mapped the entity to the stub schema that is created in the CME

[SemanticEntity(CoreVocabulary, "ExternalContentLibraryStubSchema-youtube")]
 public class YouTubeEclItem : EclItem
 {
 }

I can then update the field in the ItemList Model to be a YouTubeEclItem instead:

[SemanticProperty("s:eclTest")]
 public YouTubeEclItem EclTest { get; set; }

I then ran the application and it worked! I had a YouTube URL rendered out!

I hope this helps anyone else out that go stuck with this too.

Getting the YouTube ECL Connector to work with DXA

SDL DXA Component Links In Page Metadata

Ryan Durkin, , , , Leave a comment

In my DXA solution I was trying to change the Page Metadata to come from a Component rather but unfortunately it didn’t work out of the box.

tridion-page-metadata

Taking a look inside the ProcessMetadataField method in the DefaultModelBuilder class the code is written to work with an Embedded Schema:

if (field.FieldType==FieldType.Embedded)

But when it drops into the else statement to resolve the Component Link then it doesn’t get any content back as that Page Metadata Component is not published.

With a quick tweak to the method you can add an extra else if for a Component Link type and this is now working:

else if (field.FieldType == FieldType.ComponentLink)
{
    foreach (IComponent component in field.LinkedComponentValues)
    {
       foreach (IField subfield in component.Fields.Values)
       {
         ProcessMetadataField(subfield, meta, localization);
       }
    }
}

I also needed to change the link level value to 2 in the Generate dynamic page TBB on the Render Page Content Modular Template in order to get the Metadata Component values in the published JSON:

link-level-getpagecontent

SDL DXA Component Links In Page Metadata