Plug-in components into a view

When you create a component definition, you can automatically plug the component definition into a view by defining plug-in paths to one or several containers. A plug-in path is a unique string that describes the plug-in area. Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) provides helper classes with string constants to plug into an area without typing the plug-in area as a string. For example, you can add the following code to your component:

[Component]
private readonly string[] _plugInPaths = new string[] {
  EPiServer.Web.PlugInAreas.DefaultAssetsGroup
};

public override string[] PlugInPaths {
  get {
    return _plugInPaths;
  }
}

Plug-in component hierarchies

You can plug entire component hierarchies in by adding children to the top-level component that you create in the CreateComponent method. The following example shows how to plug in a tab to the dashboard with two components:

public override IComponent CreateComponent() {
  var root = new ComponentContainer() {
    PlugInPath = "/samples/dashboard/mycustomtab"
  };
  root.Settings["numberOfColumns"] = 2;
  root.Settings["title"] = "My custom tab";

  var fileManager = new FileManagementComponent().CreateComponent();
  fileManager.Settings["column"] = 0;
  root.Add(fileManager);

  var pageTree = new PageTreeComponent().CreateComponent();
  pageTree.Settings["column"] = 1;
  root.Add(pageTree);

  return root;
}

In this example, other plug-ins can plug into the tab due to the definition of PlugInPath = "/samples/dashboard/mycustomtab". Use a special component definition class that creates a root component (that does not have a reference to the component definition of the hierarchy) because the CreateComponent method is used when creating views and loading a personalized hierarchy.