Background
Sitefinity 9.0 introduced a new "Content as a Service" API based on the OData 4.0 protocol. This was a significant step forward for developers - until then there was no standard way to expose content via AJAX services on the frontend without writing your own. With Sitefinity 9.0, Progress gave developers the opportunity to focus on business logic and leave more of the boilerplate to the platform.
The Sitefinity team also provided a public client SDK for working with Sitefinity OData services, available from Sitefinity's public NuGet feed. This includes a basic JavaScript API, a new Kendo datasource type called "sitefinity", and documentation.
Of course there will always be limitations and more complex scenarios to handle. In this post I'll walk through one issue we ran into with OData services, its limitations, and the solution we chose.
Assumptions
- You know what Sitefinity CMS is and how to use it. If not, check the Sitefinity website and its Developer Network.
- You have at least basic knowledge of the OData 4.0 protocol. If not, check the OData website and its Getting Started section.
The Use Case
An intranet portal where an employee can create reports. The report title could match the title of one of their existing tasks. We needed an autocomplete field that would show all tasks belonging to the employee whose title contains a given string.
The Initial Approach - and the Problem
The straightforward solution: a Kendo autocomplete widget with a Kendo datasource of type "sitefinity", using the Sitefinity web services SDK.
HTML
JavaScript
This works great - but only with the startswith operator. As soon as you change the autocomplete's filter property to contains, you get this:
An "Unknown operator type" exception. The contains operator is simply not supported by the Sitefinity datasource type. Not ideal.
The Solution
Instead of using the "sitefinity" datasource type, switch to the standard odata-v4 type and call the service directly. I used a custom read function on the Kendo datasource instance, extracting the input string from the filter object and making the OData request manually.
HTML
JavaScript
Conclusion
Sitefinity OData services and the Client SDK are a solid starting point, but there is still work to be done. Keep in mind that some fairly simple and straightforward tasks can hit unexpected limitations. The approach above also gives you the flexibility to use $expand for navigation properties, add additional filters, and more.