Bridge.Kentico 0.1.0-alpha

-|--|- Bridge

The what?

• A Yaml based service for handling the promotion of Kentico CMS based items thru source control.

The why?

• Because XML is terrible to read and even harder to merge. The reason I created this was to allow us to not only break down features modularly thru some basic configs, but I wanted to make sure it was easy to adopt and that means making it easy to use with source control.

The when?

• Use this either along side an existing Kentico build using the nuget or standalone by cloning this repo and updating the connectionString parameters to match your Kentico db.

The how?

• Installation:
  • Standalone: clone, compile and run the app. Fire up a browser and go to localhost/bridge/index
  • Alongside: install via nuget and navigate to yourKenticoUrl/Admin/BridgeUI/index
• The configs:
  • CoreConfig: one or more core config can be specified. They contain a list of classtypes to care about and a list of ignoreFields on the item to simply ignore when serializing/syncing.
  • ContentConfig: one or more content config can be specified. Contains a list of pagetypes to care about and a list of ignoreFields on the items to not serialize/sync. This also will handle all custom fields. Also, a query attribute allows you to pick which content within the tree to focus on. This should support a basic Kentico Query.
• Using the GUI:
  • Core Configs:
    • Core Configs Serialize All: iterates thru all of the defined coreConfig nodes and fetches all the corresponding classes, and stuffs them into the serialization/core/{coreConfigName} folder.
    • Core Configs Sync All: this is the inverse of the Serialize All task, it takes what's in the file system and pushes it to the Kentico DB.
    • "Named Core Config" Serialize: pulls just the specified config down to the file system
    • "Named Core Config" Sync: pushes just the specified config up to the database
    • "Named Core Config" Diff: does a temp serialize of the current Kentico DB and compares it to what's in the filesystem and spits out a diff.
  • Content Configs:
    • Content Configs Serialize All: iterates thru all of the defined contentConfig nodes and fetches all the corresponding classes, and stuffs them into the serialization/content/{contentConfigName} folder.
    • Content Configs Sync All: this is the inverse of the Serialize All task, it takes what's in the file system and pushes it to the Kentico DB.
    • "Named Content Config" Serialize: pulls just the specified config down to the file system
    • "Named Content Config" Sync: pushes just the specified config up to the database
    • "Named Content Config" Diff: does a temp serialize of the current Kentico DB and compares it to what's in the filesystem and spits out a diff.
• The Endpoints:
  • Within a dev-ops cycle (ie a release to a dev or test environment) make a call to the Bridge endpoints using an authenticated call (using something like curl, wget or Invoke-WebRequest).
  • The response itself should be a stream so it will respond as things occur rather than processing everything and responding.
  • The endpoints are as follows:
    • yourUrl/bridge/diffcore?/{configName}: returns the comparison between the serialized DB and what is in the file system for the optional core configName
    • yourUrl/bridge/diffcontent?/{configName}: returns the comparison between the serialized DB and what is in the file system for the optional content configName
    • yourUrl/bridge/serializecore?/{configName}: serializes the specified core config (or all if none specified) to the filesystem
    • yourUrl/bridge/serializecontent?/{configName}: serializes the specified content config (or all if none specified) to the filesystem
    • yourUrl/bridge/synccore?/{configName}: syncs the specified core config (or all if none specified) to the database
    • yourUrl/bridge/synccontent?/{configName}: syncs the specified content config (or all if none specified) to the database
  • My ultimate goal is to leverage the endpoints in order to promote a continuous integration and deployment methodology within the Kentico community