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How to display Teamsite content in ASP.NET app?

HeyMikey

I am new to Teamsite, and have a fairly basic question about typical Teamsite-driven websites. I'm looking to get an understanding of how you can build an ASP.NET web application which has content from Teamsite DCRs.

I understand that within Teamsite you create DCTs which are basically forms (defined using XML) for creating structured content items.
I understand that the resulting content created from DCTs are XML DCRs.
Where I get a little fuzzy is how that content eventually gets onto an ASP.NET page.

So, you create presentation templates which contain tags (e.g., , ) which will generate portions of a page based on the XML in the DCR. Do these presentation templates actually get deployed to the web server? Are these tags somehow processed server-side on each web request by some interwoven library that resides in your web app? Or do these presentation templates GENERATE other fragments and it's these fragments which get deployed to the web server? How do I generate ASP.NET pages from these presentation templates? What if my pages have codebehind? What if the Teamsite content is a collection of HeebieJeebies which I need to process on the server side (e.g., bind to an ASP.NET Repeater)?

What I'd love is if there are any whitepapers, articles, postings, manuals, out there which just explain it a little more clearly. Apparently, I'm not reading the right things : )

Thanks,
Mikey

P.S. I don't have access to support.interwoven.com, as I am not a current customer or partner (e.g., I tried accessing support KB article 49749 but was unable). I have a pretty good book "The Definitive Guide to Interwoven TeamSite", but what I'm missing is a practical application. At this point, without a concrete project to work on, I can't justify the $3000 to spend on a training course.

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HeyMikey

I forgot to mention: I'm assuming SitePublisher is not in the mix here.

After further thought, there are other key capabilities that I'm wondering how you've seen accomplished with TeamSite:

1. How do you manage your sitemap and navigation? Ideally, we'd be maintaining the sitemap within the CMS and generating menus based on the nodes in the sitemap (e.g., Tier1 links across the top, you click one of those and the Tier 2 links appear on the left hand nav, you click one of those and the Tier 3 links appear under the Tier2 on the left nav).
2. A news articles repository which allows the end user to select criteria in a form and it will return a list of articles in the results. Creating the DCT and DCRs is the easy part, but how do you create a front end which has (for example) a dropdown listing the categories and execute a content search to bring back the DCRs which match the selected criteria). Is the answer simply to write a custom ASP.NET page which searches through an XML directory repository?

Thanks,
Mikey

RonaldV

Hi Mickey,

welcome to Teamsite. :-)

You pose lot's of questions. You should consider following training, but I understand your financial position for now.

Let's try to answer some of your questions by explaining some architecture when using asp.net (or any other web-app):

1. Teamsite is used to enter & store (static) content in a file-structure. This can be in a format like dcr, (custom) xml, html or aspx. If needed your dcr-content is transformed into xml/html/aspx via a presentation-template.

2. OpenDeploy deploy these file to your webserver. In normal cases opendeploy filters out any (code) files that you do not want on your webserver, f.i. a presentation-template

3. Your asp.net engine kicks in and assembles the content into a full blown html page that is send to the browser.

More:
- sitemaps: normally you'll have an "menupage"-dct to define menu-pages that are then process by asp.net into a menu.
- news: same again: news-dct & asp.net that renders overview & details.

Please note that Teamsite offers a lot of flexibility (compared to other cms's) but it comes with a cost: nothing a ready for use "out of the box".

Hope this helps.

bittu

I am new to Teamsite, and have a fairly basic question about typical Teamsite-driven websites. I'm looking to get an understanding of how you can build an ASP.NET web application which has content from Teamsite DCRs.

I understand that within Teamsite you create DCTs which are basically forms (defined using XML) for creating structured content items.
I understand that the resulting content created from DCTs are XML DCRs.
Where I get a little fuzzy is how that content eventually gets onto an ASP.NET page.

So, you create presentation templates which contain tags (e.g., , ) which will generate portions of a page based on the XML in the DCR. Do these presentation templates actually get deployed to the web server? Are these tags somehow processed server-side on each web request by some interwoven library that resides in your web app? Or do these presentation templates GENERATE other fragments and it's these fragments which get deployed to the web server? How do I generate ASP.NET pages from these presentation templates? What if my pages have codebehind? What if the Teamsite content is a collection of HeebieJeebies which I need to process on the server side (e.g., bind to an ASP.NET Repeater)?

What I'd love is if there are any whitepapers, articles, postings, manuals, out there which just explain it a little more clearly. Apparently, I'm not reading the right things : )

Thanks,
Mikey

P.S. I don't have access to support.interwoven.com, as I am not a current customer or partner (e.g., I tried accessing support KB article 49749 but was unable). I have a pretty good book "The Definitive Guide to Interwoven TeamSite", but what I'm missing is a practical application. At this point, without a concrete project to work on, I can't justify the $3000 to spend on a training course.

I think You have to use CMS generated page in that they (CE) will use your .net control.

So, It's teamsite developer responsibility to do that.

HeyMikey

Thanks for the responses.
I definitely see your point about Teamsite offering flexibility but little OOTB.

A couple points of clarification:
"- sitemaps: normally you'll have an "menupage"-dct to define menu-pages that are then process by asp.net into a menu."
This menupage DCT... would there be one DCR per menu item? Or one DCR per menu? If one per item, I suppose you would then select the parent DCR as one of the fields of each menu item?

"- news: same again: news-dct & asp.net that renders overview & details."
So, I understand that you'd have a news DCT. But how would I databind to the collection of DCTs? How do I query the DCR repository at runtime (e.g., user clicks a button and brings back a list of new articles matching his search criteria)? Do I simply dump all the DCRs into a directory and treat that like an XML repository, thus manually? Do I somehow tap into the search engine that works within the CMS? Is there a Search API that I can call from external apps (like my .NET website)?

Thanks again.

bittu

"- sitemaps: normally you'll have an "menupage"-dct to define menu-pages that are then process by asp.net into a menu."
This menupage DCT... would there be one DCR per menu item? Or one DCR per menu? If one per item, I suppose you would then select the parent DCR as one of the fields of each menu item?

I think your sitemap is a xml file which will take care of navigation.

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RonaldV

Hi,

- sitemaps: well it is up to you and your design. Going for one big dcr with the full sitemap is possible but tends to get slow (on opening of the dcr in Teamsite) and might dazzle your users. So I normally go for 1 dcr per "menu-page" in which a menupage is a list (replicant) of "sister" menu-items. Each menu-item can then optionally have a "sub-menu" with in effect is a reference to another menu-page. This way you can build a sitemap. .NET will then parse this xml-fileset and render menus, breadcrumbs, site,aps, etc. But be carefull for infinite loops (page1 -> page2 -> page3 -> page1 would be illegal) and also for referenced files that have ceised to exist (this is an ex-parrot, it is gone to meet its creator :-).

- news: up to your design again. Create a (custom designed) news DCT with the news-text & metadata (like valid-dates, category, etc). You can then either:

1. dump these xml into a directory on your webserver and have .NET cache the metadata for quick query & retrieval (give me all newsitems about category X that were published last week?)
2. dump the xml-data into a database which will be fast for queries by nature.

Teamsite does NOT offer any search-engine or API that you can tap into. Nothing OOTB.

Oh, by the way, LiveSite, which is a java-addon to teamsite, might give your ootb-functionality on this but that is java-only and not to my liking anyway.

Goog luck, hope this helps you.