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Sample: Hello World widget

Overview

The following sample creates a Hello World widget. It demonstrates how to create a ViewComponent class that is used to display a configurable message.

The sample uses the [SitefinityWidget] attribute to load the widget automatically in the Sitefinity InsertWidget dialogs.

PREREQUISITES: You must set up a Sitefinity renderer application and connect it to your Sitefinity CMS application. For more information, see Install Sitefinity in ASP.NET Core mode.

NOTE: The instructions in this sample use Visual Studio 2022 and a Sitefinity renderer project named Renderer.

View component

For Sitefinity to be able to detect and render your functionality inside your pages, you must inherit the ViewComponent.

The InvokeAsync method is required. It is called automatically every time the page is requested.
The InvokeAsync method needs an argument of type IViewComponentContext. The argument is directly populated in the method when the page is rendered.

The generic parameter refers to the Entity of the widget. In addition to your business logic, the Entity contains all properties of the widget, which are persisted in Sitefinity.

The widget has the following properties that you can use to modify the appearance and the functionality of the widget:

  • Title - the friendly name of the widget
  • Category – the category where the widget appears in the widget selector- for example, Content or Layout
  • EmptyIcon - the icon that is displayed when the widget is in an empty state.
    The available icon names are font-awesome icons.
  • EmptyIconText - the text that is displayed when the widget is in an empty state.
  • EmptyIconAction - specifies what EmptyLinkAction is performed when the empty state of the widget is clicked.
    You can choose between None and Edit.
  • SeparateWidgetPerTemplate – specifies whether the system generates a separate widget for each view template of this widget. The separate entries will be automatically generated, based on the view name inside the Select widget dialog.

NOTE: Only the public properties from the Model are persisted. The public properties that you may have in the ViewComponent.cs file are not persisted. This way, Sitefinity ensures separation between your business logic and rendering.

Folder structure

Under your Renderer project, you must create the following folders:

  • Entities/HelloWorld
  • ViewComponents
  • Views/Shared/Components/HelloWorld

Create the widget

In Visual Studio, open the Renderer application.

  • In the context menu of folder Entities/HelloWorld, click Add » Class…
  • In Name, enter HelloWorldEntity.cs and click Add.
  • In the class, paste the following code and save your changes:

  • In the context menu of folder ViewComponents, click Add » Class…
  • Select Code File.
  • In Name, enter HelloWorldViewComponent.cs and click Add.
  • In the class, paste the following code and save your changes:

  • In the context menu of folder Views/Shared/Components/HelloWorld, click Add » Class…
  • Select Code File.
  • In Name, enter Default.cshtml and click Add.
  • In the class, paste the following code and save your changes:

Build your solution.

Result

When you open your Renderer application and open the New editor, you will see the Hello World widget in the widget selector. When you add the widget on your page and click the Custom empty text link, you can enter a text string that will be displayed on the frontend.

HelloWorld

Run the sample

This sample is available in Sitefinity’s GitHub repository. You can run and play with it.
To do this, perform the following:

  1. Go to Sitefinity’s GitHub repository Sitefinity ASP.NET Core samples.
  2. Expand Code and click Download ZIP.
  3. Extract the files on your computer.
  4. In the extracted folder, navigate to sitefinity-aspnetcore-mvc-samples-master/src/hello-world folder.
  5. Open the hello-world.sln in Visual Studio.
  6. Open the appsettings.json file.
  7. In section “Sitefinity”, change the “Url” property to the URL of your Sitefinity CMS site.
    If you have deployed Sitefinity CMS on the IIS, point to “https://localhost:<https_port>".
  8. In Visual Studio, in the context menu of hello-world project, click View in Browser.
  9. Log in to your Sitefinity CMS instance and place the widget on a page.

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