Tag Archives: ecl

Oh no, my Flickr ECL just stopped working!

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Just a quick blog note on the ‘recent’ update by Flickr. Essentially they’ve removed support for http:// and only support https:// requests to the Flickr API – see the note from Flickr Code.

We utilised the excellent ECL Flickr Provider posted by Bart Koopman on SDL Tridion World and after making a tiny tweak all was at peace in the ECL Flickr world!

Simply update the http:// reference to https:// in the api\flickr.cs class, rebuild, deploy and view until your heart is content!

Special thanks to Harald Hoffelinck for working through this!

ECL and BluePrinting

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BluePrint structure
Many have asked me, “Does ECL support BluePrinting”? My reply is always a solid yes, but (yes there is a but), I should really reply with a question: “Does your external system support BluePrinting”?

Since it is nice that ECL supports BluePrinting, but ECL just exposes items from your external system in SDL Tridion. So for them to be BluePrinted, you should have your ECL Provider make the connection between an SDL Tridion Publication and the specific items you want to show in that context. An ECL item URI contains a Publication URI, so to implement BluePrinting correctly in your provider, you will need to give the child item, the same ECL Item ID as its parent item. The only thing that is tricky there is localization, an ECL item doesn’t really have a localized state, the ECL stub Component can have that state though.

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Forms without Java, XSLT or even XML

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Forms Now you might have heard that I love WebForms and advocate it everywhere I can (which isn’t necessarily true, but let’s say it is for the sake of argument). So why, you may ask, is Bart writing a provider to an online forms solution?

The answer is really quite simple – well that’s what product management said about the idea; because we recognise that our users are using many different tools to enable and facilitate their diverse content management needs and one of these is the ability to create simple online forms. That is why we built the ECL framework and why we continue to look for ways to improve our customer’s content management experience. Actually, the answer is even simpler than that: just because I can, and because I just love ECL and by now I love it more than WebForms.

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ECL event handlers

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illustrationIn my previous post about ECL, I’ve discussed querying ECL Metadata in the Broker, by making it available as part of the Multimedia (stub) Component Metadata. Now in that post I explained how it could be copied at Publishing time and the “evil” twists that process came with. In this post I’ll discuss an optional approach, using the SDL Tridion Event System which makes the process of copying external metadata to (normal) metadata less evil (just the process, not the fact that we do it ;o).

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Querying ECL Metadata in the Broker

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In my previous article about ECL, I’ve discussed the possibilities of using product information in your CMS. This sort of a setup cries out for Dynamic Component Presentations and Broker queries, which isn’t a problem, unless you want to query the ECL Metadata in the Broker.

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