Written by Tim Alonso
on February 12, 2018

SDL Web 8 - How to map ECL external metadata to your view model

The problem

An ECL item has an external metadata defined. The values in this metadata are not easily accessible within DD4T 2. I’m expecting to easily bind these values in a custom view model in my application by simply annotating properties with DD4T’s content model attributes.

First approach

The first thing that I did was to map the external metadata into my custom view model. I created an extension method on IComponentPresentation to retrieve the first matching linked component value in a specific field by their TCM id.

public static IComponent GetFirstLinkedComponentById(this IComponentPresentation componentPresentation, string fieldName, string tcmId)
{
    var component = componentPresentation.Component.Fields[fieldName].
        LinkedComponentValues.First(x => x.Id == tcmId);
 
    return component;
}

In my view model, I created a private method which would take an IComponent object. The view model already referenced DD4T library as it’s using content model attributes.

This private method then uses another extension method of IComponent for getting the ECL field from the component:

public static IFieldSet GetFieldEclExternalMetadata(this IComponent component, string fieldName, string eclExternameMetadataFieldName = "ECL-ExternalMetadata")
{
    if (component.Fields != null && component.Fields.ContainsKey(fieldName))
    {
        var namedComponent = component.Fields[fieldName];
        if (namedComponent.LinkedComponentValues != null && namedComponent.LinkedComponentValues.Any())
        {
            var metadata = namedComponent.LinkedComponentValues.First().
                ExtensionData[eclExternameMetadataFieldName];
 
            return metadata;
        }
    }
 
    return null;
}

Lesson Learned:

The implementation is fragile and difficult to maintain.
This is only applied to one component presentation.

Second approach

My second attempt was to use a custom TBB which is applied to the component presentation in question.

This approach is based on Bart Koopman’s sample code.

I had to update the sample code to handle the difference in the data structure. What I mean by that is that the sample takes a component using an ECL multimedia item which we can search.

In my current project, the data structure was that a Component List can contain many components of type “Internal Link”, “External Link”, “Internal File Link” and “External File Link”. I only wanted to process components that have an “Internal File Link” schema. This component then has a field which links to the ECL multimedia item.

This was cumbersome to build as it required a lot of XML manipulation, retrieving components using TOM.NET API and having a lot of null checks to ensure that the TBB doesn’t blow up when publishing.

Lesson Learned:

In order to use this, you must amend the allowWriteOperationsInTemplates setting to true in Tridion.ContentManager.config. There is a warning from SDL: “SDL strongly recommends against this practice as it compromises your security”. This was a deal breaker which I didn’t catch early on. Summary

There are two more approaches that I have yet to try (add the metadata through event handlers and adding the metadata in the custom ECL provider). I ran out of time to attempt the two approach and I’ve ended up using the first option.

Sources:

ECL Event Handlers

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