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I wrote a post a couple of years ago regarding my observations on developing a Kentico site using MVC in version 9. Ever since Kentico 9, there was a shift in how MVC applications are to be developed, which has pretty much stood the test of time as we've seen in releases since then. The biggest change being the CMS itself is purely used to manage content and the presentation layer is a separate MVC application connected through a Web Farm interface.

The one thing I missed when working on sites in Kentico's MVC is the ability to get values from the current document as you could do in Kentico 8 MVC builds:

public ActionResult Article()
{
    TreeNode page = DocumentContext.CurrentDocument;

    // You might want to do something complex with the TreeNode here...

    return View(page);
}

In Kentico 11, the approach is to use wrapper classes using the Code Generator feature the Kentico platform offers from inside your Page Type. The Kentico documentation describes this approach quite aptly:

The page type code generators allow you to generate both properties and providers for your custom page types. The generated properties represent the page type fields. You can use the providers to work with published or latest versions of a specific page type.

You can then use these generated classes inside your controllers to retrieve page type data.

Custom Route Constraint

In order to go down a similar approach to get the current document just like in Kentico 8, we'll need to modify our MVC project and add a custom route constraint called CmsUrlConstraint. The custom route constraint will call DocumentHelper.GetDocument() method and return a TreeNode object based on the Node Alias path.

CmsUrlConstraint

Every Page Type your MVC website consists of will need to be listed in this route constraint, which will in turn direct the incoming request to a controller action and store the Kentico page information within a HttpContext if there is a match. To keeps things simple, the route constraint contains the following pages:

• Home
• Blog
• Blog Month
• Blog Post

public static class RouteConstraintExtension
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Set a new route.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="values"></param>
    /// <param name="controller"></param>
    /// <param name="action"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static RouteValueDictionary SetRoute(this RouteValueDictionary values, string controller, string action)
    {
        values["controller"] = controller;
        values["action"] = action;

        return values;
    }

    #region CMS Url Contraint

    public class CmsUrlConstraint : IRouteConstraint
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Check for a CMS page for the current route.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="httpContext"></param>
        /// <param name="route"></param>
        /// <param name="parameterName"></param>
        /// <param name="values"></param>
        /// <param name="routeDirection"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
        {
            string pageUrl = values[parameterName] == null ? "/Home" : $"/{values[parameterName].ToString()}";

            // Check if the page is being viewed in preview.
            bool previewEnabled = HttpContext.Current.Kentico().Preview().Enabled;

            // Ignore the site resource directory containing Image, CSS and JS assets to save call to Kentico API.
            if (pageUrl.StartsWith("/resources"))
                return false;

            // Get page from Kentico by alias path in its published or unpublished state.
            // PageLogic.GetByNodeAliasPath() method carries out the document lookup by Node Alias Path.
            TreeNode page = PageLogic.GetByNodeAliasPath(pageUrl, previewEnabled);

            if (page != null)
            {
                // Store current page in HttpContext.
                httpContext.Items["CmsPage"] = page;

                #region Map MVC Routes

                // Set the routing depending on the page type.
                if (page.ClassName == "CMS.Home")
                    values.SetRoute("Home", "Index");

                if (page.ClassName == "CMS.Blog" ||  page.ClassName == "CMS.BlogMonth")
                    values.SetRoute("Blog", "Index");

                if (page.ClassName == "CMS.BlogPost")
                    values.SetRoute("Blog", "Post");

                #endregion

                if (values["controller"].ToString() != "Page")
                    return true;
            }

            return false;
        }
    }

    #endregion
}

To ensure page data is returned from Kentico in an optimum way, I have a PageLogic.GetByNodeAliasPath() method that ensures cache dependencies are used if the page is not in preview mode.

Apply Route Constraint To RouteConfig

public class RouteConfig
{
    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        ...

        // Maps routes to Kentico HTTP handlers.
        // Must be first, since some Kentico URLs may be matched by the default ASP.NET MVC routes,
        // which can result in pages being displayed without images.
        routes.Kentico().MapRoutes();

        // Custom MVC constraint validation to check for a CMS template, otherwise fallback to default MVC routing.
        routes.MapRoute(
            name: "CmsRoute",
            url: "{*url}",
            defaults: new { controller = "HttpErrors", action = "NotFound" },
            constraints: new { url = new CmsUrlConstraint() }
        );

        ...
    }
}

Usage In Controller

Now that we have created our route constraint and applied it to our RouteConfig, we can now enjoy the fruits of our labour by getting back the document TreeNode from HttpContext. The code sample below demonstrates getting some values for our Home controller.

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        TreeNode currentPage = HttpContext.Items["CmsPage"] as TreeNode;

        if (currentPage != null)
        {
            HomeViewModel homeModel = new HomeViewModel
            {
                Title = currentPage.GetStringValue("Title", string.Empty),
                Introduction = currentPage.GetStringValue("Introduction", string.Empty)
            };

            return View(homeModel);
        }

        return HttpNotFound();
    }
}

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong in terms of the approach you as a Kentico developer use when getting data out from your page types. Depending on the scale of the Kentico site I am working on, I interchange between the approach I detail in this post and Kentico's documented approach.

To make it easy for a client to add in related links to pages like a Blog Post or Article, I like implementing some form of automation so there is one less thing to content manage. For a Kentico Cloud project, I took this very approach. I created a UrlHelper class that will carry out the following:

• Take in an absolute URL.
• Read the markup of the page.
• Selects the title tag using Regex.
• Remove the site name prefix from title text.

using Microsoft.Extensions.Caching.Memory;
using MyProject.Models.Site;
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace MyProject.Helpers
{
    public class UrlHelper
    {
        private static IMemoryCache _cache;

        public UrlHelper(IMemoryCache memCache)
        {
            _cache = memCache;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Returns the a title and URL of the link directly from a page.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="url"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public PageLink GetPageTitleFromUrl(string url)
        {
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(url))
            {
                if (_cache.TryGetValue(url, out PageLink page))
                {
                    return page;
                }
                else
                {
                    using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
                    {
                        try
                        {
                            Stream stream = client.OpenRead(url);
                            StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(stream, System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("UTF-8"));

                            // Get contents of the page.
                            string pageHtml = streamReader.ReadToEnd();

                            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(pageHtml))
                            {
                                // Get the title.
                                string title = Regex.Match(pageHtml, @"\<title\b[^>]*\>\s*(?<Title>[\s\S]*?)\</title\>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Groups["Title"].Value;

                                if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(title))
                                {
                                    if (title.Contains("|"))
                                        title = title.Split("|").First();
                                    else if (title.Contains(":"))
                                        title = title.Split(":").First();

                                    PageLink pageLink = new PageLink
                                    {
                                        PageName = title,
                                        PageUrl = url
                                    };

                                    _cache.Set(url, pageLink, DateTimeOffset.Now.AddHours(12));

                                    page = pageLink;
                                }
                            }

                            // Cleanup.
                            stream.Flush();
                            stream.Close();
                            client.Dispose();
                        }
                        catch (WebException e)
                        {
                            throw e;
                        }
                    }
                }

                return page;
            }
            else
            {
                return null;
            }
        }
    }
}

The method returns a PageLink object:

namespace MyProject.Models.Site
{
    public class PageLink
    {
        public string PageName { get; set; }
        public string PageUrl { get; set; }
    }
}

From an efficiency standpoint, I cache the process for 12 hours as going through the process of reading the markup of a page can be quite expensive if there is a lot of HTML.

When developing a website that is quick to load on all devices, caching from both a data and asset perspective is very important. Luckily for us, Kentico provides a comprehensive approach to caching data in order to minimise round-trips to the database. But what about asset caching, such as images, CSS and JavaScript files?

A couple days ago, I wrote an article on the Syndicut Medium publication on how I have added cache busting functionality in our Kentico CMS builds. I am definitely interested to hear what the approaches other developers from the Kentico network take in order to cache bust their own website assets.

Take a read here: https://medium.com/syndicutstudio/cache-busting-kentico-cf89496ffda0.

When building MVC websites, I cannot get through a build without using a method to convert a partial view to a string. I have blogged about this in the past and find this approach so useful especially when carrying out heavy AJAX processes. Makes the whole process of maintaining and outputting markup dynamically a walk in the park.

I've been dealing with many more ASP.NET Core builds and migrating over the RenderPartialViewToString() extension I developed previously was not possible. Instead, I started using the approach detailed in the following StackOverflow post: Return View as String in .NET Core. Even though the approach was perfectly acceptable and did the job nicely, I noticed I had to make one key adjustment - allow for views outside controller context.

The method proposed in the StackOverflow post uses ViewEngine.FindView(), from what I gather only returns a view within the current controller context. I added a check that will use ViewEngine.GetView() if a path of the view ends with a ".cshtml" which is normally the approach used when you refer to a view from a different controller by using a relative path.

public static class ControllerExtensions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Render a partial view to string.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="TModel"></typeparam>
    /// <param name="controller"></param>
    /// <param name="viewNamePath"></param>
    /// <param name="model"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static async Task<string> RenderViewToStringAsync<TModel>(this Controller controller, string viewNamePath, TModel model)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewNamePath))
            viewNamePath = controller.ControllerContext.ActionDescriptor.ActionName;

        controller.ViewData.Model = model;

        using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter())
        {
            try
            {
                IViewEngine viewEngine = controller.HttpContext.RequestServices.GetService(typeof(ICompositeViewEngine)) as ICompositeViewEngine;

                ViewEngineResult viewResult = null;

                if (viewNamePath.EndsWith(".cshtml"))
                    viewResult = viewEngine.GetView(viewNamePath, viewNamePath, false);
                else
                    viewResult = viewEngine.FindView(controller.ControllerContext, viewNamePath, false);

                if (!viewResult.Success)
                    return $"A view with the name '{viewNamePath}' could not be found";

                ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(
                    controller.ControllerContext,
                    viewResult.View,
                    controller.ViewData,
                    controller.TempData,
                    writer,
                    new HtmlHelperOptions()
                );

                await viewResult.View.RenderAsync(viewContext);

                return writer.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
            }
            catch (Exception exc)
            {
                return $"Failed - {exc.Message}";
            }
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Render a partial view to string, without a model present.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="TModel"></typeparam>
    /// <param name="controller"></param>
    /// <param name="viewNamePath"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static async Task<string> RenderViewToStringAsync(this Controller controller, string viewNamePath)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewNamePath))
            viewNamePath = controller.ControllerContext.ActionDescriptor.ActionName;
            
        using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter())
        {
            try
            {
                IViewEngine viewEngine = controller.HttpContext.RequestServices.GetService(typeof(ICompositeViewEngine)) as ICompositeViewEngine;

                ViewEngineResult viewResult = null;

                if (viewNamePath.EndsWith(".cshtml"))
                    viewResult = viewEngine.GetView(viewNamePath, viewNamePath, false);
                else
                    viewResult = viewEngine.FindView(controller.ControllerContext, viewNamePath, false);

                if (!viewResult.Success)
                    return $"A view with the name '{viewNamePath}' could not be found";

                ViewContext viewContext = new ViewContext(
                    controller.ControllerContext,
                    viewResult.View,
                    controller.ViewData,
                    controller.TempData,
                    writer,
                    new HtmlHelperOptions()
                );

                await viewResult.View.RenderAsync(viewContext);

                return writer.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
            }
            catch (Exception exc)
            {
                return $"Failed - {exc.Message}";
            }
        }
    }

}

Quick Example

As you can see from my quick example below, the Home controller is using the RenderViewToStringAsync() when calling:

• A view from another controller, where a relative path to the view is used.
• A view from within the realms of the current controller and the name of the view alone can be used.

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public async Task<IActionResult> Index()
    {
        NewsListItem newsItem = GetSingleNewsItem(); // Get a single news item.

        string viewFromAnotherController = await this.RenderViewToStringAsync("/Views/News/_NewsList.cshtml", newsItem);
        string viewFromCurrentController = await this.RenderViewToStringAsync("_NewsListHome", newsItem);

        return View();
    }
}