How to execute ascx in Tridion Site 9.1 (Migrating from Tridion 2011)

Question

For a client I'm finally migrating a Tridion 2011 environment to Tridion Site 9.1.

It took my already a lot of time to do the upgrade/install of the Content Manager and the Content Delivery but most of this is finally working. (My experience was stuck on Tridion 2013 so a lot of concepts introduced in Web 8 and Site 9.1 are new for me).

Unfortunately I discovered (to late) that the Content Interaction Library (CIL) cannot be used to render ASCX fragments. And we are using this a lot on the different sites hosted by the Tridion environment.

We have some dynamic component templates with output format "ASCX Webcontrol" this are published to filesystem. We load a list of components with one of this templates on a page.

Our initial code looked like

---

ComponentPresentationAssembler Assembler = new ComponentPresentationAssembler("tcm of puplication", page); //Page is the aspx page System.Web.UI.Page string content = Assembler.GetContent("tcm of component","tcm of component template");

---

With the CIL this was always returning empty content. So I have done following changes:

• change the output format to REL
• modify the constructor for the ComponentPresentationAssembler by using new ComponentPresentationAssembler(publicationID, pageId);
• for testing I have also stored the ascx to database and then they are loaded like for REL

The result of this was that the content was not empty anymore but the tridion:ComponentLink tags are not executed but rendered in the html instead. That was also the reason why in the original project we were storing the ascx files on filesystem.

So I'm looking now to a solution to be able to load more or less this component pressentations in the same way like we did in the past without to many modifications.

Is it for example an option to still publish the ascx files to filesystem and write our own logic to get this directly from file system? If yes what is the best way?

Or is there some trick that I can use to 'execute' the component presentation when the data is coming from database instead?

Thanks for all the help!

Answer 1

Yes, in Tridion 9.1 we can still publish items to the file system.

In the cd_storage_conf.xml where the Discovery Service is installed, add the <Storage> element to publish files to the file system inside the <Storages> element like this:

<Storage Class="com.tridion.storage.filesystem.FSDAOFactory" Id="ascx" Type="filesystem" defaultFilesystem="true">
    <Root Path="C:\Temp"/>
</Storage>

To ensure that only ASCX files are published to the file system, inside the <ItemTypes> element, add an <Item> element setting the itemExtension to .ascx and the typeMapping to ComponentPresentation.

<Item cached="false" storageId="ascx" itemExtension=".ascx" typeMapping="ComponentPresentation" />

Restart the Discovery Service. This should deploy the .ascx files on to the path specified in the Storage element.

Answer 2

I finally did it a little bit the ugly way by still publishing the ascx to file system like on the Tridion 2011 install.

I have replaced the ComponentPresentationAssembler code that was trying to load the componentpressentation with my own code. This code is now checking if the published ascx file exist and if that's the case then it loads the controller and write it to a string.

It can probably be improved and it's definitely not future proof.

The code looks like:

string content = "";
string virtualPath = $"~/dcp/pub{publicationID}/dcp/asp/dcp{componentTemplateId}_{componentID}.ascx";

if (File.Exists(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(virtualPath)))
{
    Control control = page.LoadControl(virtualPath);
    if (control != null)
    {
       using (TextWriter myTextWriter = new StringWriter(new StringBuilder()))
       {
            using (HtmlTextWriter myWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(myTextWriter))
            {
                 control.RenderControl(myWriter);
                 content = myTextWriter.ToString();
             }
        }
    }
}
else
{
    ComponentPresentationFactory factory = new ComponentPresentationFactory(publicationID);
    ComponentPresentation cp = factory.GetComponentPresentation(TCMHelper.BuildComponentTCMId(componentID, publicationID), TCMHelper.BuildComponentTemplateTCMId(componentTemplateId, publicationID));
     if (cp != null)
     {
       content = cp.Content;
     }
}

Answer 3

I faced similar issue in the past.

Answer to your original problem DCPs published as REL in the database, and your DCP template output has a component link tag. which is not getting resolved in the web app.

Your case:

Pages – stored in the filesystem
DCPs – stored in DB
Web app dotnet uses CIL.

you should be able to get it working a Component Presentation in REL format with following settings in tcdl_conf.xml in deployer-service

    <!-- Uncomment any of the following lines to set the target language as a specific language -->
    <!--<Property Name="tcdl.page.target.language" Value="jsp" />-->
    <!--<Property Name="tcdl.page.target.language" Value="dotnet" />-->
    <Property Name="tcdl.target.language" Value="rel"/>
    <Property Name="tcdl.page.target.language" Value="dotnet" />

Refer to the SDL documentation reference for Enabling publishing of Pages with REL format Dynamic Component Presentations

I hope it helps