Strategy: catalog connection with managed metadata multivalue field ~ valerio valrosso

Everybody knows about SharePoint catalog connection... maybe

What if you have a pre-existing catalog connection and your customer asks you to switch from a single value field (generally ItemCategory) to a multivalue field?

In a ideal world you should quote this and say "don't do it, don't even think about it"

In a business world you'll say "Yes, why not?".

I tried to convert the single value field in a multivalue field... trust me... don't try this if you don't like strange side effects.

AS IS

This is the typical product catalog configuration:

A product catalog site which is used as backend website
Contents are crawled by search service application
Public sites connect to indexed catalog

Solution
To understand next steps, mind every link under categories navigation term is allowed.
Let's assume you have a term set like that

Category 1

Subcategory 11
Subcategory 12

Category 2

Subcategory 21

The catalog connection automatically creates these category friendly urls:

http://site/category1
http://site/category1/subcategory11
http://site/category1/subcategory11
http://site/category2
http://site/category2/subcategory21

So let's assume i have a product named Test, which is tagged on ItemCategory with term "Subcategory 11", i'll go to URL http://site/category1/subcategory11/test .

But what if i tell you that links like these below will not repond with a 404?
http://site/category1/test
http://site/category1/subcategory12/test
http://site/category2/test
http://site/category2/subcategory21/test

This behaviour will be extremely useful for us.

Editing product catalog
Because you don't want to destroy catalog connection, you just have to add a TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti field to the product catalog item content type

<field displayname="MultivalueItemCategory" enforceuniquevalues="FALSE" group="Custom" id="{E7548D45-7EBF-4510-94E4-079ACFFD7BF6}" mult="TRUE" name="MultivalueItemCategory" required="FALSE" showfield="Term1033" sourceid="{d5f28009-1f31-45bf-8b91-5aef7dd33f07}" staticname="MultivalueItemCategory" type="TaxonomyFieldTypeMulti">
  <customization>
    <arrayofproperty>
   <property>
     <name>TextField</name>
     <value instance:type="types:string" xmlns:instance="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:types="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">{024FECDC-E8A7-4DAC-BEB1-E9C373708BE5}</value>
   </property>
    </arrayofproperty>
  </customization>
</field>
<field displayname="MultivalueItemCategory_0" group="Custom" hidden="TRUE" id="{024FECDC-E8A7-4DAC-BEB1-E9C373708BE5}" name="MultivalueItemCategoryTaxHTField0" required="FALSE" showinviewforms="FALSE" sourceid="{d5f28009-1f31-45bf-8b91-5aef7dd33f07}" staticname="MultivalueItemCategoryTaxHTField0" type="Note">
</field>

Link this new field to the term set you use to tag catalog items.
After that, you can create a event receiver in order to write the first value entered in MultivalueItemCategory field in ItemCategory field (or the field you use for the catalog connection).
Create Content Search Web Part replacements
This is the most annoying part, we have to create a Web Part that we will use in category pages.
This web part does essentially three things:

Recover the current navigation term
Make a query searching che term related to the navigation term, in the MultivalueItemCategory we defined above
Substitute Path values (catalog item friendly url) in order to make links relative to the current navigation term
Show results

The core methods are

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 try
 {
  if (SPContext.Current.FormContext.FormMode == SPControlMode.Display)
  {
   TaxonomySession taxonomySession = new TaxonomySession(SPContext.Current.Site);
   Term term = null;
 
   SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(() =>
   {
    using (SPSite elevatedSite = new SPSite(SPContext.Current.Site.ID))
    {
     TaxonomySession elevatedTaxonomySession = new TaxonomySession(elevatedSite);
     term = TaxonomyNavigationContext.Current.NavigationTerm.GetTaxonomyTerm(elevatedTaxonomySession);
    }
   });
 
   CatalogConnectionManager catalogConnectionManager = new CatalogConnectionManager(SPContext.Current.Site);
   List<catalogconnectionsettings> catalogConnectionSettings = catalogConnectionManager.ConnectedPublishingCatalogs;
   this.catalogConnectionSettings = catalogConnectionSettings[0];
 
   this.RenderGeneric(term);
  }
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  // Do something
 }
}
 
 
private void RenderGeneric(Term term)
{
 try
 {
  ...
 
  this.productsTable = this.GetProducts_Generic(term, SPContext.Current.Site, null);
 
  ...
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  // Do something
 }
}
 
private DataTable GetProducts_Generic(Term term, SPSite currentSite)
{
 DataTable dt = null;
 string queryText = string.Empty;
 
 try
 {
  if (term != null)
  {
   queryText = string.Format(@"owstaxIdMultivalueItemCategory:""GPP|#{1}""", term.Id);
 
   List<string> selectManagedProperties = new List<string>() { ... };
   List<string> ascendingManagedProperties = new List<string>() { ... };
 
   if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(queryText))
   {
    // Get product data table (in this case i use my library)
    dt = SearchQueryHelper.GetSearchQueryData(currentSite, queryText, selectManagedProperties, null, this.catalogConnectionSettings.ResultSourceId, false, ascendingManagedProperties, null, null);
   }
  }
 
  List<string> sourceUrls = this.GetUrls2SubstituteSource(TaxonomyNavigationContext.Current.NavigationTerm);
  string destUrl = this.GetUrl2SubstituteDestination(TaxonomyNavigationContext.Current.NavigationTerm);
  dt = this.RewritePaths(dt, sourceUrls, destUrl);
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  // Do something
 }
 
 return dt;
}
 
private DataTable RewritePaths(DataTable dataTable, List<string> sourceUrls, string destUrl)
{
 try
 {
  string path = string.Empty;
 
  foreach (DataRow dr in dataTable.Rows)
  {
   path = dr["Path"].ToString();
 
   Uri uri = new Uri(path);
   string friendlyUrl = uri.Segments[uri.Segments.Length - 1];
   string baseUrl = uri.OriginalString.Replace(uri.LocalPath, string.Empty);
   string rewrittenUrl = string.Format("{0}/{1}/{2}", baseUrl, destUrl, friendlyUrl);
 
   dr["Path"] = rewrittenUrl;
  }
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  // Do something
 }
 
 return dataTable;
}
 
private List<string> GetUrls2SubstituteSource(NavigationTerm navigationTerm)
{
 List<string> urls = new List<string>();
 
 try
 {
  List<navigationterm> navigationTerms = TaxonomyHelper.GetPinnedTerms(navigationTerm.TermSet);
 
  foreach (NavigationTerm nv in navigationTerms)
  {
   string relativeUrl = TaxonomyHelper.GetRelativeUrl(nv);
   urls.Add(relativeUrl);
  }
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  // Do something
 }
 
 return urls;
}
 
private string GetUrl2SubstituteDestination(NavigationTerm navigationTerm)
{
 string url = string.Empty;
 
 try
 {
  url = TaxonomyNavigationContext.Current.NavigationTerm.FriendlyUrlSegment.DefaultValue;
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  // Do something
 }
  
 return url;
}

About the single product page you can create a web part or a page layout, which has to contain methods similar to the previous web part.
This web part, must get the product using the navigation term and the friendly url segment and show the result.

Editing publishing site
In pages document library, you have to create a category page (which contains the category CSWP replacement), and a product page (which contains the product CSWP replacement) and then edit target page settings for terms like this

And that's all folks.

valerio valrosso

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Strategy: catalog connection with managed metadata multivalue field

0 commenti:

Post a Comment

Me, myself and I

Linkbacks