Reflection

Last week I blogged about SEO lowercase URLs, a concept known to many, and I blatantly stole the idea for the post from someone else. Today I'm gonna try to build on the other post, actually providing some input of my own, and show how one can easily do custom property validation, without having to write your own custom property. Having custom properties can be a tedious way to work, when all you essentially have is a string property, or a PageReference. The other post contains the code for hooking into events, so I suggest you get it from there if you have no idea where to put this.

First, we hook into the event DataFactory.Instance.SavingPage.

void Instance_SavingPage(object sender, PageEventArgs e) {

    // Check if the page is a ReferenceContainer
    if (e.Page is ReferenceContainer) {
        var refContainer = e.Page as ReferenceContainer;
        // Check if the property OfficePage has a value
        if (!PageReference.IsNullOrEmpty(refContainer.OfficePage)) {
            var office = refContainer.OfficePage.GetPage();
            // Check if the page selected in the OfficePage property is of the correct type.
            if (!(office is OfficePage)) {
                e.CancelAction = true;
                e.CancelReason = LanguageManager.Instance.Translate("/errors/validation/properties/OfficePage");
            }
        }
    }

    // Check if the page is an OfficePage
    if (e.Page is OfficePage) {
        var officePage = e.Page as OfficePage;
        // Check if the property ReferenceContainer has a value
        if (!PageReference.IsNullOrEmpty(officePage.ReferenceContainer)) {
            var refContainer = officePage.ReferenceContainer.GetPage();
            // Check if the page selected in the ReferenceContainer property is of the correct type.
            if (!(refContainer is ReferenceContainer)) {
                e.CancelAction = true;
                e.CancelReason = LanguageManager.Instance.Translate("/errors/validation/properties/ReferenceContainer");
            }
        }
    }
}

Basically, we try to get the page from the PageReference property, if it's set, and check if it's of the correct type using functionality in PageTypeBuilder. PageTypeBuilder, I love you.

As always, comments are welcome, maybe I've tried to solve this whole issue the wrong way. Please let me know if I did :)