Globalization

The Globalization module can be used to retrieve useful information about all the publications in your Tridion environment through easy to use helper methods in a Dyndle web application. An example of the information available through this module is the url of a publication, with which you could easily create a language selector dropdown for your Dyndle website that will redirect users to the url for the selected language`s website.

To install this module simply install the Dyndle.Modules.Globalization NuGet package available through the nuget.org package library.

Using the helper methods

The helper methods for the globalization module can be used by adding a @using Dyndle.Modules.Globalization and @using Dyndle.Modules.Corestatement at the top of your views, or by adding the Dyndle.Modules.Globalization and Dyndle.Modules.Core namespaces in your views web config. Information from your publications can then be retrieved with the Html.Publications() statement as demonstrated below.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Publication metadata</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                @foreach (var publicationMeta in Html.Publications())
                {
                    <li>Title: @publicationMeta.Title</li>
                    <li>ID: @publicationMeta.Id</li>
                    <li>Key: @publicationMeta.Key</li>
                    <li>MultimediaPath: @publicationMeta.MultimediaPath</li>
                    <li>MultimediaUrl: @publicationMeta.MultimediaUrl</li>
                    <li>PublicationPath: @publicationMeta.PublicationPath</li>
                    <li>PublicationUrl: @publicationMeta.PublicationUrl</li>
                }
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

The Html.Publications() statement can optionally be provided with a boolean value that indicates whether the publication currently being used in the web application should be excluded from the results. This value is set to true by default and can be switched off by calling the function like so Html.Publications(false).

Publication Custom Metadata

The globalization module can also be used to retrieve custom user defined metadata from Tridion. The Dyndle installer will have added a template building block named PublicationCustomMeta which is added to a page template named PublicationMeta. This page template can be used to generate a page which contains the custom metadata for all the publications in your Tridion environment. Custom metadata can be added to a publication by accessing the publication properties and selecting a metadata schema. You can create your own schema and select it here, the only requirements being that it must be a metadata schema and it must only use text, number, date or rich text fields. Now, when the page template is used on a page the values entered in the custom metadata will be available to the globalization module when it is published.

The Globalization module needs to be configured to know which page is used for the custom metadata. Simply provide the url of the page in the following app setting and the custom metadata will be made available as part of the same html helper method as the regular publication metadata.

<add key="Globalization.SourceUrl" value="/system/publication-meta.html" />

In this example the page that used the PublicationMeta template was stored in a structure group named system with a page named publication-meta.

In the following code example the use of the html helper method to retrieve the custom publication metadata is demonstrated.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td>Custom publication metadata</td>
        <td>
            <ul>
                @foreach (var publicationMeta in Html.Publications())
                {
                    if (publicationMeta.CustomMeta != null)
                    {
                        <li>Custom meta:
                            <ul>
                                @foreach (var item in publicationMeta.CustomMeta)
                                {
                                    <li>@item.Key - @item.Value</li>
                                }
                            </ul>
                        </li>
                    }
                }
            </ul>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

The CustomMeta property of the publications returned by the Html.Publications() method will contain a list of key value pairs where the key is the name of the field that was defined in the custom metadata schema assigned to the publication properties and the value contains the value set for that field. Custom logic for the values of specific fields can be easily added by matching the name of the field to the key of the custom meta property.