For developers: Facades

A facade is a design pattern that simplifies the complex details of a system. For example, a facade can make a class library easier to use by providing a simplified interface for it. A facade would usually consist of all the library classes.

Since the Fluent API is another layer of abstraction, or a wrapper of the basic API introduced in Sitefinity CMS, there are different facades that can be used in the context of the Fluent API to make the developers' work easier.

In the following example, the Blog() statement acts as a facade to everything related with the Blog content type. It gives options for creating, deleting, or updating a blog in Sitefinity:

There are other facades that give access to other system parts and content types - facades for news, pages, taxonomies, etc.

Following is a sample list of facades:

• Album used to work with an image library - AlbumFacade
• Albums used to work with a set of image libraries - AlbumsFacade
• Blog used to work with a blog - BlogFacade
• Blogs used to work with a set of blogs - BlogsFacade
• BlogPost used to work with a blog post - BlogPostFacade
• BlogPosts used to work posts in any of the blogs - BlogPostsFacade
• ContentItem used to work with a generic content item - ContentItemFacade
• ContentItems used to work with a set of generic content items - ContentItemsFacade
• Document used to work with a document - DocumentFacade
• Documents used to work with a set of documents - DocumentsFacade
• DocumentLibrary used to work with a document library - DocumentLibraryFacade
• DocumentLibraries used to work with a set of document libraries - DocumentLibrariesFacade
• Event used to work with an event - EventFacade
• Events used to work with a set of event items - EventsFacade
• Image used to work with an image - ImageFacade
• Images used to work with a set of images - ImagesFacade
• Page used to work with a page - PageFacade
• Pages used to work with a set of pages - PagesFacade
• NewsItem used to work with a news item - NewsItemFacade
• NewsItems used to work with set of news items - NewsItemsFacade
• Video used to work with a video - VideoFacade
• Videos used to work with a set of videos - VideosFacade

Each of this facades provide methods for creating, updating, deleting, and getting items for further processing.

For more information about how to start using the App class, how to choose a provider to work with, and how to select the content type or module you want to work with, see For developers: Entry point and methods.

In some cases, when you work with a given facade, you need to access another one. This is usually the case when you work with parent and child objects, such as a page and a widget, a content item and a comment, a taxonomy and a taxon.

In the following code example there are both page and widget facades. It creates a page with name My Test Page and adds two widget in it. After this, it creates another page and finally it executes all the actions in a single transaction via the SaveChanges() method: 

NOTE: The Done() method is returning the parent facade, which is the page facade. This allows you to continue the work with the parent object, after you have finished with the child one. The Done() method is returning the parent facade object, and is called in child facades.