Custom Views for an Interface

Ever played around with adding custom views in Episerver CMS? It's a really powerful way to extend the UI. But why does it work when you register your view for a model class, but not for an interface implemented by that model? I had a look and found out.

Dont get your hopes up - this is just a short blog post to remind myself of a fun little detail that would otherwise cause me to probably waste an hour again some day looking for exactly the same issue.

It's a neat and pretty common thing to add custom views for your content. I've done it in a dozen integrations of various kinds, and it's described in many (!) blog posts:

Today, I was once again using the views, but I needed to have them work for an interface rather than the specific model class. Something like this:

    [ContentType(GUID = "EE3BD195-7CB0-4756-AB5F-E5E223CD9820")]
    [MediaDescriptor(ExtensionString = "pdf,docx")]
    public class GenericMedia : MediaData, IMyContentInterface
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets or sets the description.
        /// </summary>
        public virtual String Description { get; set; }
    }

But when I changed it to be an interface it stopped showing up. That seemed a bit odd, so instantly I fired up dotPeek and took a look at how the Episerver views are registrered. And they are registrered towards IContentData and IContent - so why won't it work for me? Here's my view:

    [ServiceConfiguration(typeof(EPiServer.Shell.ViewConfiguration))]
    public class MyView : ViewConfiguration<IMyContentInterface>
    {
        public MyView()
        {
            Key = "myView";
            Name = "My View";
            Description = "A view with my stuff";
            ControllerType = "epi-cms/widget/IFrameController";
            ViewType = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/mypathtomycontroller/myview");
            IconClass = "myicon";

        }
    }

Turns out to be stupid simple: Views needs to match up their types with the proper UIDescriptors. If you don't have a UI Descriptor, then get one - even if you don't plan to use it.

This fixed the issue:

    [UIDescriptorRegistration]
    public class MyUIDescriptor: UIDescriptor<IMyContentInterface>
    {
        public MyUIDescriptor()
        {
          //Potentially set the default view or disable some other views  
        }
    }

Custom Views for an Interface

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