How to get the Last Published Date of the page?

Question

I need to get the Last Published Date of the Page in Tridion DXA 1.2

When I preview the page in CME, I am seeing an attribute in JSON ouput as below

"LastPublishedDate":"0001-01-01T00:00:00"

Value of the attribute is always as above, it is not giving the right value ever and it is not added to the DXA Page Model at delivery side to use it.

So, decided to get the LastpublishedDate from Broker Data Base, Items table.

Is there any DXA OOTB method to get the LastPublishedDate from Broker DB?

Answer 1

It indeed seems that Page.LastPublishedDate is never set by DD4T Templates. DXA (currently) also has no OOTB model mapping for this property.

However, it is quite easy to obtain the last publish date using the CD API. Something like:

PageMetaFactory pageMetaFactory = new PageMetaFactory(Convert.ToInt32(localization.LocalizationId));
IPageMeta pageMeta =  pageMetaFactory.GetMeta(Convert.ToInt32(pageModel.Id));
DateTime lastPublishDate = pageMeta.LastPublicationDate;

There is no need to use the DD4T Provider for this purpose.

If you want all your Page Models to have a last publish date set, you could create your own Page Controller: a subclass of DXA's built-in PageController which overrides the EnrichModel method. You can put above logic in that override. You could store the date in PageModel.ExtensionData:

using Sdl.Web.Mvc.Controllers;
using System;
using Sdl.Web.Common.Models;

namespace Example
{
    public class MyPageController : PageController
    {
        protected override ViewModel EnrichModel(ViewModel model)
        {
            PageModel pageModel = (PageModel) base.EnrichModel(model);

            Localization localization = WebRequestContext.Localization;
            PageMetaFactory pageMetaFactory = new PageMetaFactory(Convert.ToInt32(localization.LocalizationId));
            IPageMeta pageMeta = pageMetaFactory.GetMeta(Convert.ToInt32(pageModel.Id));
            pageModel.SetExtensionData("LastPublishDate", pageMeta.LastPublicationDate);

            return pageModel;
        }
    }
}