Migrating your .NET Application

Over the years, we've made significant improvements to the way you can use Agility CMS within your .NET Applications, specifically around the way you Access Content, Page Management, and URL Redirections.

Let's take a deeper dive into each of these topics.

Accessing Content

Old

In .NET MVC and older legacy .NET applications, content was accessed using a Content Repository.

For example:

//filter products by a particular category
    int categoryID = 20; //ContentID of the category
    string categoryRowFilter = string.Format("ProductCategoryID = {0}", categoryID);
    string sortByTitle = "Title ASC";
    IList productsFilteredByCategory = module.Products.Items(categoryRowFilter, sortByTitle);


//get a subset of products from the list
    int skip = 10; //number of products to skip
    int take = 10; //number of products to take
    string rowFilter = ""; //not filtering by anything
    IList products = module.Products.Items(rowFilter, sortByTitle, take, skip);


//get products by their exact Content IDs
    int contentID = 2343;
    string contentIDs = "1232,43543,234";

    //GetById and GetItemsByIDs is found in Agility.Web.Extentions
    Product productByID = module.Products.GetById(contentID);
    IList productsByIDs = module.Products.GetItemsByIDs(contentIDs);


//sort products by IDs
    string sortIDs = "23,19,20,22,21";
    IList productsSortedByIDs = module.Products.SortByIDs(sortIDs);

In MVC4 applications, Views and Partial Views were used to render HTML with Models, where as .NET Core applications used View Components.

New

In .NET7 and later, content is now accessed using our Fetch API. Many benefits come from moving towards this approach with our Fetch API, including a Global CDN with caching and performance benefits.

We've made configurations separate, but made to work together. Dependency Injection is used to inject the Fetch API service on start up, which wires up the HTTPS client for the ability to call our Fetch API:

// This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        services.AddRazorPages();

        services.Configure<AppSettings>(Configuration.GetSection("AppSettings"));

        services.AddHttpContextAccessor();

        services.AddHttpClient<FetchApiService>();

        services.AddSingleton<AgilityRouteTransformer>();
    }

You can inject the Fetch API service anywhere in your project (View Components, Controllers, Etc):

   private readonly FetchApiService _fetchApiService;
        private readonly AppSettings _appSettings;


        public SiteHeader(FetchApiService fetchApiService, IOptions<AppSettings> appSettings)
        {
            _fetchApiService = fetchApiService;
            _appSettings = appSettings.Value;
        }

Dynamic Helpers are used to take JSON data and deserializes it to create strongly typed classes:

        var getItemParameters = new GetItemParameters()
            {
                ContentId = Constants.SiteHeaderContentId,
                Locale = locale
            };

            var content = await _fetchApiService.GetContentItem(getItemParameters);
            var siteHeader = DynamicHelpers.DeserializeTo<ContentItemResponse<Agility.Models.SiteHeader>>(content);

Set your strongly typed model and pass it to the View(s) you are rendering:

var siteHeaderModel = new SiteHeaderModel()
  {
      SiteHeader = siteHeader.Fields,
      SitemapPages = deserializedSitemap
  };

You can now also generate Model Types for content definitions using the Agility CLI.

Our new approach is more flexible and supports all the features of our Fetch API.

Page Management

Old

In older .NET applications, Page Management was handled with a global.asax file using routes.

New

In .NET7 and later, you now have the ability to opt-in/out of Page Management if you choose to.

Opting-in to Page Management is as simple as downloading the Agility Core Nuget Package and adding your endpoints.

Learn More

Redirects

Old

In older .NET applications, URL Redirections are enabled by default. This cannot be changed (opt-in/out or create your own)

New

In .NET7 and later, you can create your own redirect middleware and don't have to use Agility's option for redirects.

Adding URL Redirections to your application is as simple as downloading the Agility Core Nuget Package and adding your redirects to the Startup.cs file.

Learn More