Kentico MVC - Getting TreeNode At Controller Level

I wrote a post a couple of years ago regarding my observations on developing a Kentico site using MVC in version 9. Ever since Kentico 9, there was a shift in how MVC applications are to be developed, which has pretty much stood the test of time as we've seen in releases since then. The biggest change being the CMS itself is purely used to manage content and the presentation layer is a separate MVC application connected through a Web Farm interface.

The one thing I missed when working on sites in Kentico's MVC is the ability to get values from the current document as you could do in Kentico 8 MVC builds:

public ActionResult Article()
{
    TreeNode page = DocumentContext.CurrentDocument;

    // You might want to do something complex with the TreeNode here...

    return View(page);
}

In Kentico 11, the approach is to use wrapper classes using the Code Generator feature the Kentico platform offers from inside your Page Type. The Kentico documentation describes this approach quite aptly:

The page type code generators allow you to generate both properties and providers for your custom page types. The generated properties represent the page type fields. You can use the providers to work with published or latest versions of a specific page type.

You can then use these generated classes inside your controllers to retrieve page type data.

Custom Route Constraint

In order to go down a similar approach to get the current document just like in Kentico 8, we'll need to modify our MVC project and add a custom route constraint called CmsUrlConstraint. The custom route constraint will call DocumentHelper.GetDocument() method and return a TreeNode object based on the Node Alias path.

CmsUrlConstraint

Every Page Type your MVC website consists of will need to be listed in this route constraint, which will in turn direct the incoming request to a controller action and store the Kentico page information within a HttpContext if there is a match. To keeps things simple, the route constraint contains the following pages:

Home
Blog
Blog Month
Blog Post

public static class RouteConstraintExtension
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Set a new route.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="values"></param>
    /// <param name="controller"></param>
    /// <param name="action"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static RouteValueDictionary SetRoute(this RouteValueDictionary values, string controller, string action)
    {
        values["controller"] = controller;
        values["action"] = action;

        return values;
    }

    #region CMS Url Contraint

    public class CmsUrlConstraint : IRouteConstraint
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Check for a CMS page for the current route.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="httpContext"></param>
        /// <param name="route"></param>
        /// <param name="parameterName"></param>
        /// <param name="values"></param>
        /// <param name="routeDirection"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
        {
            string pageUrl = values[parameterName] == null ? "/Home" : $"/{values[parameterName].ToString()}";

            // Check if the page is being viewed in preview.
            bool previewEnabled = HttpContext.Current.Kentico().Preview().Enabled;

            // Ignore the site resource directory containing Image, CSS and JS assets to save call to Kentico API.
            if (pageUrl.StartsWith("/resources"))
                return false;

            // Get page from Kentico by alias path in its published or unpublished state.
            // PageLogic.GetByNodeAliasPath() method carries out the document lookup by Node Alias Path.
            TreeNode page = PageLogic.GetByNodeAliasPath(pageUrl, previewEnabled);

            if (page != null)
            {
                // Store current page in HttpContext.
                httpContext.Items["CmsPage"] = page;

                #region Map MVC Routes

                // Set the routing depending on the page type.
                if (page.ClassName == "CMS.Home")
                    values.SetRoute("Home", "Index");

                if (page.ClassName == "CMS.Blog" ||  page.ClassName == "CMS.BlogMonth")
                    values.SetRoute("Blog", "Index");

                if (page.ClassName == "CMS.BlogPost")
                    values.SetRoute("Blog", "Post");

                #endregion

                if (values["controller"].ToString() != "Page")
                    return true;
            }

            return false;
        }
    }

    #endregion
}

To ensure page data is returned from Kentico in an optimum way, I have a PageLogic.GetByNodeAliasPath() method that ensures cache dependencies are used if the page is not in preview mode.

Apply Route Constraint To RouteConfig

public class RouteConfig
{
    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        ...

        // Maps routes to Kentico HTTP handlers.
        // Must be first, since some Kentico URLs may be matched by the default ASP.NET MVC routes,
        // which can result in pages being displayed without images.
        routes.Kentico().MapRoutes();

        // Custom MVC constraint validation to check for a CMS template, otherwise fallback to default MVC routing.
        routes.MapRoute(
            name: "CmsRoute",
            url: "{*url}",
            defaults: new { controller = "HttpErrors", action = "NotFound" },
            constraints: new { url = new CmsUrlConstraint() }
        );

        ...
    }
}

Usage In Controller

Now that we have created our route constraint and applied it to our RouteConfig, we can now enjoy the fruits of our labour by getting back the document TreeNode from HttpContext. The code sample below demonstrates getting some values for our Home controller.

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        TreeNode currentPage = HttpContext.Items["CmsPage"] as TreeNode;

        if (currentPage != null)
        {
            HomeViewModel homeModel = new HomeViewModel
            {
                Title = currentPage.GetStringValue("Title", string.Empty),
                Introduction = currentPage.GetStringValue("Introduction", string.Empty)
            };

            return View(homeModel);
        }

        return HttpNotFound();
    }
}

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong in terms of the approach you as a Kentico developer use when getting data out from your page types. Depending on the scale of the Kentico site I am working on, I interchange between the approach I detail in this post and Kentico's documented approach.