Sitecore Data Provider Resources

I was recently given some work to improve a Sitecore Data Provider that connects into a 3rd party DAM system called WebDAM. My first port of call was the Sitecore documentation which was only slightly helpful in explaining the theory but not really any real world examples to help me. My issue was also being unable to start from scratch as there wasn’t time for that so I headed over to Google. I pretty much spent days trawling the results for help and thought I would post the most useful links that I found as I finished my work by combining code from all of these:

• Sitecore Documentation: Github.IO Docs
• Nick Wesselman Black Art of Data Providers – https://www.techphoria414.com/blog/2011/january/black-art-of-sitecore-data-providers/ – Great post to explain the basics as well as the gotchas
• Blair Scott – Persisting ID’s – http://www.blair-scott.com/2014/08/sitecore-data-providers-persisting-ids/  – I needed to do this to make use the ID from the DAM system as the unique identifier and not the GUID that Sitecore generates
• Owen Niblock Data Provider Project – https://github.com/owenniblock/sitecore-base-data-provider – A fantastic base project which also hooks into a DAM system. I would have started with this project if I had the opportunity to start again.
• ITZ SimpleHierachicalReadOnlyDataProvider –  Bitbucket Source Code – Most of the data provider samples out there don’t take into account that the provider might be organised in folders and this one does

The one project I struggled to get a hold of was BitsOnTheRun by Nick Wesselman. I eventually found it on the old marketplace but thought I would upload it to my Github just in case somebody else was looking for it: https://github.com/RyanDurkin/sitecore-bits-on-the-run

Without the awesome Sitecore community I probably would have never completed the work so thanks to everyone in the links above and hopefully this post will help someone else in the community also.