Declaring a content type

Declaring content types for basic persistence is straightforward, as the rules for this are part of the Entity Framework Code First documentation.

For content persistence, it is possible to use a wide range of types as a content model, subject to the following rules

• The type can contain any primitive property
• The type can contain standard .Net value typed properties like DateTime
• The type cannot contain interface-typed properties or those of types which have subtypes (e.g. object)
• The type can contain properties typed to other types which follow these rules
• The type can inherit from other types with follow these rules
• The type can contain a List<T> of a type which follows these rules
• The type must be marked with SerializableAttribute, and therefore be binary serializable.  It also needs to be Json serializable.  If it follows the above rules, it should be serializable in both these ways.
• When initialised, the type must not have any complex object or collection set to null; this can be conveniently be ensured by running BaseContent.InitialiseProperties(this) in the constructor.

Ideally the type will inherit directly or indirectly from BaseContent.  The primary advantage of this is that the type will then carry its metadata around: otherwise, if you wish to save it you will have to specify what content address to save it to.

By convention, content type names have the word Content added to the end to distinguish them.

See Predefined content subtypes for a list of the built-in subtypes Lynicon provides to help with common use cases in web content.

See Content type attributes for a list of the attributes which can be applied to content types and their properties

Example

The following is a typical example of a content type declaration:

[Serializable]
public class Block : Switchable
{
	[UIHint("Html")]
	public string Text { get; set; }
 
	[UIHint("Multiline")]
	public string Code { get; set; }
 
	public Image Image { get; set; }
 
	public Block()
	{
		Image = new Image();
	}
}
 
[Serializable]
public class ManualContent : PageContent
{
	[Summary, Index(IndexAttribute.Mode.TextualAndAgglomerated)]
	public string Title { get; set; }
 
	public List<Block> Body { get; set; }
 
	[JsonIgnore, ScaffoldColumn(false), Index(IndexAttribute.Mode.TextualAndAgglomerated)]
	public string BodyText
	{
		get
		{
			var sb = new StringBuilder();
			foreach (var b in Body)
			{
				sb.Append(" ");
				sb.Append(HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(b.Text.StripRegions("<", ">")));
			}
 
			return sb.ToString();
		}
	}
 
	public ManualContent()
	{
		BaseContent.InitialiseProperties(this);
	}
 
	List<Summary> manualIndex = null;
	public List<Summary> ManualIndex()
	{
		if (manualIndex == null)
		{
			manualIndex = Collator.Instance.Get<Summary, ManualContent>()
				.OrderBy(s => s.Url)
				.ToList();
		}
 
		return manualIndex;
	}
}