This week you can meet with Parlot, which is a fast, lightweight, and simple to use .NET parser combinator! Check out our post for the orderable deployment steps, the improvements of the Kast platform, and many more! Orchard Core updates Make deployment steps orderable This is about making deployment steps orderable in the UI, to allow drag and drop to get steps where you want them to be. UI only, as the choice to when steps run should be up to the user. Let's say you have plenty of plans where features don't want to be first - more common when deploying to existing sites, rather than building up recipes, but steps are for both. And now you can also find hints to the important steps that suggest they should go first, like "Content Definitions should be placed before any content steps." Update from node-sass to dart-sass This is about replacing gulp-sass with its newer gulp-dart-sass because node-saas is now deprecated and the latest node-sass doesn't compile on the latest NodeJS anymore. So, it's recommended on the gulp-sass repository be upgraded to gulp-dart-sass as node-sass is deprecated. You can read more about it in this article. Fix WorkflowBlockingActivitiesIndex table indices name length for PostgreSQL This is an interesting one, so we think this should deserve a few lines. Check out the Migrations file in the OrchardCore.Workflows module where you can see the creation of two different indices: IDX_WorkflowBlockingActivitiesIndex_DocumentId_ActivityId and IDX_WorkflowBlockingActivitiesIndex_DocumentId_ActivityName. Because of the PostgreSQL name length limit, it uses only IDX_WorkflowBlockingActivitiesIndex_DocumentId_Activity for both which causes an exception. The fix is just to reduce the length of these indices. Add Properties to SetupContext There is a SetupContext class that had some properties like SiteName, AdminUserName, AdminUserId, etc. This SetupContext class will be prepopulated by the setup screen and then passed to ISetupHandler. But now the ISetupHandler accepts an IDictionary to work with these properties. But why is it useful? When setting up a tenant or site sometimes you need to pass in some custom data and use it in your setup recipes. Like when a user registers on a site and he submits a form with firstname, lastname, etc. We then call a workflow that creates the tenant and executes a setup recipe. In this setup recipe, we could create a landing page and we want to assign the firstname, lastname to be set as the displaytext of the landing page content item. Or another use case would be to populate the custom user profile settings during setup. So, from now, the developers can populate the Properties bag from his workflow task or a custom setup screen if they would like to. You can see a good example in the ExecuteAsync method of the SetupTenantTask. Demos Parlot The Shortcodes repository by Sébastien Ros contains a Shortcodes processor for .NET with a focus on performance and simplicity. And now that Shortcodes processor is updated to use a new parser called Parlot. Parlot is a French pronunciation of the word like chat or someone who talks a lot. In French, you write it parlotte. Parlot is a hand-written parser for Shortcodes and that parser is now extracted to make it reusable. You can find adding and using Parlot in the Shortcodes module in this PR. If you check out that pull request, you will see that before this PR we had the Character.cs, Cursor.cs classes. Now they aren't here anymore, they are in the package. The code is almost the same. Now we have a ShortcodesParser.cs that is using Parlot. And in this file, you can find the grammar of Shortcodes. A text is based on shortcode and TEXT nodes. A Shortcode can have an identifier and arguments. An argument is like identifier equals value. It's actually could be just a value if you want. And a value is either a string or a number. This class contains a bunch of first-level methods like ParseNode, ParseRawText, and so on. If you check out the JSON benchmarks of Parlot, you will see a nice table about the performance of Parlot. And in that table, you can see the performance of parsing JSON documents. As you can see, it is ten times faster than something like Sprache, which is a famous parser. Pidgin has been created to be faster than Sprache and now Parlot is faster than Pidgins. If you take a look at the allocations, you can see that they are equal because it's just about allocating JSON. This benchmark creates an expression tree (AST) representing mathematical expressions with operator precedence and grouping. Same thing here. This table is about comparing the low level, the fluent API, and Piding. Even the Fluent API is five times faster than Pidgin. And in terms of allocation, it's a little bit better than Pidgin. Here you can see a demo video about Parlot and a lot more than that! Like stories about the NCalc library that is created by Sébastien Ros 10 years ago. NCalc is a mathematical expressions evaluator in .NET. NCalc can parse any expression and evaluate the result, including static or dynamic parameters and custom functions. And that library is used by the Sprache.Calc library. Sprache.Calc provides easy to use extensible expression evaluator based on the LinqyCalculator sample. The evaluator supports arithmetic operations, custom functions, and parameters. It takes a string representation of an expression and converts it to a structured LINQ expression instance which can easily be compiled to an executable delegate. In contrast with interpreted expression evaluators such as NCalc, compiled expressions perform just as fast as native C# methods. We can fill up the whole This week in Orchard post just by these libraries and the story behind Parlot. Or we can start to describe how the parser works and how you can extend it with your own implementations, but this may no longer be closely related to the topic of this series. So, as we just mentioned before: if you are interested in these topics, this will be your presentation! Resource Zones, Resource Layers, Resource Widgets Kast is an Australian company and one of their primary goals is to implement the Kast platform with the Kast Group Finder component. We worked together with Seth Cleaver (Co-founder and Director of Kast) on this tool to be able to create an intuitive self-service process that enables people within a church to easily find a suitable group to attend, simplify the administrative processes required for getting people into groups, and provide information to the group co-ordinators that might assist in planning and measuring effectiveness. Check out this case study about how we've developed this multi-tenant social group management platform for churches! The Kast platform is growing from time to time and this time you could see an improvement from Dean Marcussen which is about providing ways to edit static resources (like JavaScript and CSS) using the admin UI. The exact issue in GitHub is opened by Dody Gunawinata a while ago about the downside of the current theme system is that to change anything will require deployment. The way around is to include the JS/CSS in a template and include them in every other template. Check out the following recording for a possible solution! It didn't seem like the design was wanted for Orchard Core itself, so it will probably remain private at this stage. But if the people wanted it, it might be possible to make it available at some point as a contribution module. News from the community Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 190 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

Workflows atomicity, support inline scripts and style sheets, admin UI sticky buttons, filter and search feature for List Part too. Do we need to tell more about the content of our current post? Let's jump into the recent news of Orchard Core! Orchard Core updates Support Inline location for styles and scripts You can specify several options when working with commonly used resources like JavaScript libraries and CSS files like using a configured CDN or appending a version hash to all local scripts and style sheets. You can also specify a location the script should load, for example, you can say that I would like to render my style sheet in the HEAD of my page. If the location is not specified or specified as Inline, the script will be inserted wherever it is placed (inline). Let's say we have a site set up using the Agency recipe. Then let's navigate to Design -> Templates on the admin UI and find the predefined Content__LandingPage template. Here we can try out the new Inline mode using Liquid helpers! Try to inject the jQuery named script inline before we render the Portfolio content items. To do that we just need to add the following line: {% script name:"jQuery", at:"Inline" %}. And as you can see in the code, there is the script HTML tag right after the jQuery script text. Filter/search feature for List Part too If you navigate to the content items list of your site (Content -> Content Items) you can use a nice search feature that you can use to filter your content items by the display text values. You can also use the quick filters to see only the draft/published items or the ones that owned by you. But you can't use this filter for the List Part lists. Until now! If you have a site with a Blog recipe, head to the Blog option on the admin UI and check out the new UI. You will see the exact same filter and search here as we have seen on the content items list. New IUserClaimsProvider interface This is about the extensibility of the ClaimsProviders. You used to have to inherit from the DefaultUserClaimsPrincipalFactory to provide all the claims but now you have a new IUserClaimsProvider interface that you can implement. There are some default ones like the EmailClaimsProvider. Workaround for DateTimeOffset in indexes The OpenIdAuthorizationIndex hasn't been sent to Dapper by YesSql correctly. Here the DateTimeOffset? hasn't been handled correctly and the workaround is to use DateTime?. So, for now, the local fix is to use DateTime? instead of DateTimeOffset? in the index provider and DateTime instead of DateTimeOffset in the migrations. Demos Sticky action buttons on the admin UI The problem is that you have to do a lot of scrolling to find the action buttons to save, publish or preview your content item. There could be several options to solve this issue but now to experiment how easy to use the implemented solution, this one only affects the Templates page right now. The idea that has been implemented is to have sticky action buttons on the top of the page instead of showing them at the bottom of the screen. If you set up your site using the Agency recipe and open the predefined template (Design -> Templates) and scroll down a little bit you will see the same screen as we show here. If you would like to see the sticky buttons in action too, head to YouTube and check out this recording. And as always, if you have any feedback or suggestion on how to solve the issue of needing to scroll down a lot to reach the action buttons, don't hesitate to share your ideas on GitHub! Workflows atomicity In this demo, you could see a workflow that has a starting activity that is about to handle an incoming HTTP GET request. This workflow will call an endpoint using an HTTP GET request 30 times using a For Loop activity. After that 30 actions finished, the workflow will publish a new content item and display a simple success notification. You could ask that what is the goal to call a given endpoint 30 times and you are right. But for this time the goal of this workflow is to demonstrate that we have a long-running workflow and this process can perfectly demonstrate that. Make sure you can only have one instance of this workflow type at the same time by putting a tick in the Single instance checkbox. Because it's a single instance if you call this workflow again without the first one has been successfully finished, the execution will wait for the first one to be finished. So, the system will only start to execute the second call after the first execution was finished with or without an error. In this demo, you can see what will happen if you do 10 concurrent requests to start this workflow. You will see 10 workflow instances instead of 1. But why? It's a singleton, you should see only one instance, right? Let's navigate to the properties of the given workflow where you will see two new options: Lock timeout and Lock expiration and give them a value in ms like 10000. Now let's try to call this workflow again using 10 concurrent requests. What will happen that now if you check out the instances of the given workflow, you will find only one item there. Check out the recording to see what are these new options exactly and how to use them correctly! News from the community Work with us! You've completed the Dojo Course, congratulations! You’re now officially an Orchard Core developer. Would you like to work on a variety of challenging Orchard Core projects with the biggest Orchard team in the world? Work with us! Just send us an e-mail to crew at lombiq.com. Please include what you’re most interested in professionally and attach around 100 lines of any kind of code that you’re especially proud of or just link to the favorite open-source project of your own on GitHub or else. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 191 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

We prepared with a huge demo about showing you how you can use the custom VueForms module for Orchard Core! But first, let's check out the latest news around Orchard Core. Read our current post to find out an obsolete interface! Orchard Core updates Fix sizing of HTML/MarkdownEditor settings to be consistent in the correct zones There were some inconsistencies with the sizing of some field elements settings and other views. Some hints were full-width, some were restricted to col-md-6, other col-sm-6. Hint boxes should also align together with the rest of the fields.And one more thing here: the general settings/common to all editors should be in the Content zone and editor modes should be in the Editor zone. The issues had been fixed, they all look like this now, without uneven padding, and shapes are consistently ordered. Obsolete IContentAliasManager The IContentAliasProvider was renamed to IContentHandleProvider. The idea behind that is the alias was a bad name because it was in conflict with the AliasPart and they are two different things. They are related somehow because a handle now can come from an alias, but a handle is a generic term to say you can get a content item from different ways, like using a content item ID or a slug or alias. Whatever kind of identifier you want to give to your content item and then when you load a content item by its handle, you provide a prefix. In the past, the IContentAliasManager was just marked as obsolete and make it backward compatible, but the backward compatibility code didn't work. So, don't forget, if you injected the IContentAliasManager in the past and you update your Orchard Core solution to the latest, you will need to use the IContentHandleManager instead. Ensures shell terminating and disposing When e.g. we enable a feature for a given shell through the admin, the shell is released in the context of a shell scope, and at the end of this scope (if it is the last one for this shell) the terminate events are called and then the shell is disposed. But when e.g. we reload a tenant through the admin or when a shell releases its dependents, a shell may be released without having any current scope on it, so it is disposed immediately but without calling the shell terminate events. So here, in that case, we create a new scope (without using it) and dispose it to let it manage the shell state as usual. Note: In that case, the terminate events are called synchronously, we would need a shell ReleaseAsync(), but at least there are called. Another suggestion would be to get rid of the terminate events that are not used in the current code. So, in summary Here we ensure that the shell terminating/terminated events are called, even if the shell is not terminated by the last shell scope, e.g when the shell is released by dependency or when changed through the tenant's admin UI. So, right now we kept the terminate events. Here we also call the shell terminating/terminated events before the BeforeDispose callbacks that we use to call the session commit asynchronously, which is better if a terminate event uses an ISession. Demos VueForms module The StatCan Orchard Core repository houses a collection of custom Orchard Core resources, modules, and themes that support various web applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. Built on top of Orchard Core CMS, developers have a suite of web application features out of the box (e.g. content management, authentication, forms, themes, etc) by customizing the selection and configuration of components. The extensibility of the framework allows new features and components to be added easily. One of the custom modules called VueForms, which aims to simplify the creation of client-side forms in OrchardCore. Let's see that module in action! Clone this repository and set up your site. Now go to Configuration -> Features and enable the VueForms and the VueForms Localized modules. The first is about provide a Form content type that simplifies using VueJs forms in the frontend and the second one is about to weld the LocalizedText part to the VueForms. The difference between the built-in Forms module and this one is that it's using client-side validation using Vue.js, Vuelidate, and Vuetify. Now if you navigate to the Content menu option, you will find a new one called Vue Forms. Here you can manage your Vue Form content types. Let's create a new one called Contact us! You have the option to disable or enable your form. If you disable the form, you can set an HTML, that is displayed when someone tries to render a disabled form. This feature is about creating the form on the back-end and no one can access it on the front end. If the server-side validation passes you will get the message that you can provide in the Success Message text box. Or it's doesn't, you can display the text that you can type in the Error Message textbox. Next one is the client init script. This is actually a client-side JavaScript, where you can set client-side actions. Right now here we set the required fields and in this case, we use it to localize the VeeValidate field validations. The required messages are coming from our localize liquid filter. The OnValidation is a server-side script, this is using Jint. Here you can get the form data and then you can perform validation here. This is not complete yet, the end goal would be to have widgets and the validation would be placed inside the widgets. The widgets would generate the client-side and server-side validation together. The addError() method allows you to add an error and map that input into the client-side. Here comes the OnSubmitted section. This is where you would perform actions after validation. Let's say the validation passes, there are no errors added, that means this script is called. In this case, we are creating a new predefined ContactRequest content item. And in the Localized Text section, you can create localizations with a key-culture pair. Here you can add as many as you want by clicking on the Add button, you can delete them by clicking on the trash bin icon, and reorder them with the little hamburger icon. The getLocalizedTextValues() function in the OnValidation section is used to get the localized text for the current culture that you defined here. This content type has a Form Part too that you can use to add a new Vue Component widget. Using that you can set the VueJS Component template. It's basically code, you are writing your Vue.js component here. You provide the template and you also have the script that is a typical Vue.js component script. The template is using the ValidationProvider component that wraps your inputs and provides a validation state using scoped slots. Now let's publish this new content item and view it in the front-end! Here you can see we have already filled out this form with some data but the email address is wrong. If we click on send, we will get the Your email is invalid error message, which is a client-side validation error. But that's not all! Enable the Workflows module and create a new workflow type called VueForm submitted. Click on the Add Event button and you will find a new category in the modal window called VueForm. And there is a new VueForm Submitted event that is fired when a VueForm passed validation and is submitted. Here you can also select the forms for which this workflow runs. We have only the Contact Us right now, so select this one. And using that event you can say send an email to the site admins if the form submission was successful. The whole repository and this module have great documentation where you can read more about these scripts and how to customize your VueForm content items. And don't forget to check out the recording of this demo on YouTube! News from the community Using the OrchardCore OpenID management feature with an existing OpenIddict deployment Kévin Chalet is one of the main contributors of Orchard Core. He developed the OpenID management feature for Orchard Core. In his blog post, he writes about how you can use the GUI of Orchard Core with an existing OpenIddict server, that is typically located in another project. Orchard Dojo Newsletter Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter has 163 subscribers! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

We have mentioned the Shortcodes feature several times and now it's available in the preview packages of Orchard Core. We will also show a demo about how you can use our .NET Analyzers in your Orchard Core solution. Check out our post for more! Orchard Core updates Tabs syntax changed in the documentation Orchard Core documentation contains code samples both in Liquid and Razor languages. You can see the given code samples in tabs near each other. If you want to change between them you just need to click on the Razor or the Liquid tab to see the snippets. Now, if you would like to improve the documentation and put some snippet there too, you have to use a new syntax in Markdown. In the screen below you can see the old one in red, and the new one in green. Thank you for making the documentation better and better! Media root folder selected by default If you navigated to the dashboard of Orchard Core and opened the Media Library (Content -> Media Library) you may found that the images in the root folder were not available on the list on the right. The workaround was to create a new folder to see the files in the root. Now, this issue is fixed, the media root folder is selected by default and you are able to see the content in the media library without any workarounds. New icons for User Disabled and Enabled events A small UI change here. When you add a new User Disabled or User Enabled event to your workflow you will find new icons here. These icons are also used when you are working on your events on the kanban board of your workflows. Shortcodes feature merged Shortcodes are small pieces of code wrapped into [brackets] that can add some behavior to content editors, like embedding media files. The Image Shortcode can be used to display an image from the media library in your WYSIWYG editors. The simplest way to use that Shortcode is the following: . And the good news is that now you can find the Shortcodes and the Shortcode Template features in the preview packages of Orchard Core! In case if you missed you can find two videos on YouTube about Shortcodes: check out this one first, then watch this video for the second part of the demo! We also mentioned these features in This week in Orchard too several times. Check out this for an introduction, then this one for the first demo, finally don't forget to read this post to see the improvements of the Shortcodes! And the documentation is available in this URL! Update configuration documentation The documentation now contains more lines to explain how to read a configuration from an external config file, that you can use in your Startup class. Click here to see the updated page! New workflow task to validate user There is a new Validate User Task to check if the user exists for the current request and has the specified role(s). This task has three outcomes: InRole: if the user in the current request has at least one of the selected roles. Anonymous: if the user in the current request is anonymous. Authenticated: if the user in the current request is authenticated If you check the Set the 'UserName' workflow property if the user is authenticated checkbox, the username of the current user will be added to the Properties dictionary of the WorkflowExecutionContext that you can use in the upcoming tasks. Demos Lombiq .NET Analyzers Our Lombiq .NET Analyzers repository contains .NET code analyzers and code convention settings for Lombiq projects. We use these to enforce common standards across all our .NET projects, including e.g. in all of our open-source Orchard Core extensions. If you contribute to our open-source projects while using that solution you'll be guided by these rules too. There is a built-in code analyzer in Visual Studio, but there is a lot of other analyzer projects out there. These analyzers can find issues in your code, but this is about to extend that and try to find even more issues. The Readme.md file in the repository tells you how you can add these files to your solution in just two quick steps! Now let's see a simple example of this! Let's imagine that you have an interface with a method that represents an asynchronous operation. After we created our great interface with the method you will notice that the IDE complains about some stuff. First of all, we have an interface and a method in it with no documentation. The DoSomethingGreat method is an async method, so the correct name of the method would be DoSomethingGreatAsync. Pretty cool, right? But that's not all! Head to YouTube to see the full demo about Lombiq .NET Analyzers! News from the community Extending event handlers sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core Orchard Core Training Demo module is a demo Orchard Core module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. You can use this module as part of a vanilla Orchard Core source that including the full source code - which is the recommended way. You can use it as part of a solution the uses Orchard Core NuGet packages, however, it's harder to look under the hood of Orchard Core features. The latest update of the module is about to show you how you can extend Orchard Core with event handlers. The LoginGreeting class is about to implement the ILoginFormEvent interface and shows a notification to the user after a successful login. Check out the code here! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 160 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

This week we see the latest improvements of the Shortcodes module and the new pages of the Orchard Core documentation! Don't forget about our Traning Demo module, which has now got a new RESTful web API sample! Check out our current post for more! Orchard Core updates Highlight invalid fields When you have a driver for your content part or for your content field, the UpdateAsync method will be called when you are about to save and persist the new values of it. Let's say you have a TextField and you want to set it to be required. In the UpdateAsync method of the TextFieldDisplayDriver, we get the TextFieldSettings and if the value of the Required property is true and the Text property of the TextField has no value, then it's time to show an error for the user. Notice the second parameter of the AddModelError method. This is about passing a key to the ModelStateDictionary. The key would be the value of the Text property of the TextField and the Prefix would be the BlogPost.Subtitle string. But why is it important right now? Because there was an issue in Orchard Core about the different highlightings. If there is a validation error, it would be great to highlight the input editor, not just showing the validation summary at the top of the form. So, imagine you have a site installed with the Blog recipe and you set the Subtitle TextField of the Blog Post content type to be required. If you would like to save the existing blog post without providing a subtitle, the driver will pass the BlogPost.Subtitle as the Prefix and the name of the field.Text will be null. It's a small, but a good to know tip to provide a better user experience when editing values. Document Link Tag Helper There is a Tag Helper and a Liquid Helper in Orchard Core called Link that you can use to define the relationship between the current document and an external resource such as a favicon or stylesheet. This helper is available for a while, but there were no words in the documentation about it. Now you can find some lines in the documentation about how to use these helpers in your Orchard Core site. Add user updated event Two weeks ago we wrote about the new user deleted event, which is about to add a new DeletedAsync method to the IUserEventHandler. Now there is another new event for user events, that is about to occur when a user is updated. You can find the new UpdatedAsync method in the IUserEventHandler. And a new event is also accessible from your workflow type. If you create a new workflow type and click on the Add Event button, you will find the User Updated event in the User category. Password configuration documentation The password restrictions are set with the settings configured in ASP.NET Identity. Those options are used to define the required password strength when a user password is set. You can configure these requirements in order to specify properties like the minimal password length or if the process is expecting digits, uppercase, or non-alphanumeric characters. Check out the new how-to guide in the Orchard Core documentation to see how to change these settings and how to read configuration from an external config file! Demos Shortcodes improvements Two weeks ago we wrote about the upcoming Shortcodes feature for Orchard Core. Shortcodes are essential to WordPress, and for the Orchard Core, we wanted a similar feature. The parser was written by hand as the syntax is simple and it needs to be efficient. Check out that post if you haven't read that yet and don't forget to watch the recording on YouTube about that too! Now, let's continue from where we left off and see the newest improvements in that module! Set up your site using the Blog recipe, then head to Configuration -> Features to enable these features: Shortcode Templates: The Shortcode Templates feature provides a way to write custom shortcode templates from the admin. Shortcodes: The Shortcodes feature adds shortcode capabilities. Now head to Design and notice that the Shortcode Templates options is renamed to Shortcodes. Click here and add a new Shortcode! Here you will meet with a slightly changed editor. The first thing that you will notice is when you are starting to fill out the Name, the Hint, and the Usage inputs you will get a live preview in the right about how the card of the Shortcode will look like. You can ask what card do we mean, but let's not move so fast! The Categories selector is now working the same when you add tags to your blog post. You can type to search for the existing categories or add a new category right here from the editor. The Content will be about having the logic of the Shortcode. Here we create a Shortcode called safeimage, it means we sanitize the input from the user before rendering the content. We also created another Shortcode called unsafeimage. That would be the same, the only difference is we didn't call the sanitize Liquid helper. Now edit the Article content item named About. The HTML editor here has the Insert Shortcode button on the toolbar. Click on it and now you will see the cards we have just mentioned a few lines ago! Here you can filter by the name of the Shortcode and can filter by categories. Now let's try out the unsafeimage and the safeimage Shortcodes! After editing the code we have the following lines in the HTML body: unsafeimage: [unsafeimage]media/samoyed.jpg" onload=alert('xss')[/unsafeimage]unsafeimage: [unsafeimage]media/samoyed.jpg[/unsafeimage]safeimage: [safeimage]media/samoyed.jpg[/safeimage] Notice the script in the first line! Because we added this inside an unsafeimage Shortcode, it will render the alert when the user views this page. If we would put this little hack inside a safeimage Shortcode, then it would prevent the alert to appear. But that's not all about Shortcodes! If you would like to see more, don't forget to check out this recording on YouTube! News from the community RESTful web API sample in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core The Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core is a demo Orchard Core CMS module for training purposes guiding you to become an Orchard developer. You can use this module as part of a vanilla Orchard Core source that includes the full source code - which is the recommended way. You can also use it as part of a solution that uses Orchard Core NuGet packages, however, it's harder to look under the hood of Orchard Core features. And the module just got a new little RESTful web API sample! Check it out if you're learning Orchard and want to develop web APIs! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 157 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting! There will be no This week in Orchard post next week because of vacation, so see you in two weeks!

This week we show you two demos of the brand new upcoming features of Orchard Core! The first one is the Shortcodes feature, that allows text content editors to inject specialized content blocks using custom arguments, like images, twitter embeds, youtube videos, only with simple blocks like [video 123]. The Audit Trail module provides log records for creation, deletion of any Content Type, and events like user events, as you may see it Orchard 1.x. Heads up for a post full of demos! Orchard Core updates Add user deleted event In the OrchardCore.Users.Handlers.IUserEventHandler there was no contract for the user deleted event. From now there is the new DeletedAsync method that is invoked if a user has been deleted. Check out the code in the UserStore.cs file, where you can see the invoking of the new method. This new event is also accessible from your workflow type. If you create a new workflow type and click on the Add Event button, you will find the User Deleted event in the User category. Admin CSS/Bootstrap regressions Back in Bootstrap 3, col-lg means nothing, so we had some special CSS in the admin theme to make it mean something. In Bootstrap 4, the col-* now means something, because here you have auto-sizing columns. It's still not exactly ideal because there is a lot of variation for the sizes. You can see the new names here to make them more meaningful. These are the new classes in the TheAdmin.scss file. Demos Shortcodes Sébastien Ros created a new open-source project called Shortcodes. This is a .NET library to parse and evaluate shortcodes. It allows text content editors to inject specialized content blocks using custom arguments, like images, twitter embeds, youtube videos, only with simple blocks like [video 123]. Shortcodes are essential to WordPress, and for the Orchard Core, we wanted a similar feature. The parser was written by hand as the syntax is simple and it needs to be efficient. Thanks to Dean Marcussen, this library will be integrated into Orchard Core soon. In this demo, we will see what we can do in Orchard Core using that library! Let's say you installed your site using the Blog recipe. Make sure that the Shortcodes feature is enabled. When you are editing a content item with a WYSIWYG HTML editor (for example the HtmlBody Part of the Article content type or a content type with a MarkdownBody Part) you can get a little pop-up if you are clicking on the Insert Shortcode button near the Link button by default. The pop-up will contain a list of the available shortcodes. Let's try the one called bold now. As you may guess, this shortcode is about to make your text bold. Select it from the list and provide the text that you would like to appear as bold. Note that here we used the [bold "bold text"] syntax when made the text bold. That works, because if you check the definition of the bold shortcode, you could see that we get the value of the text using the args.NamedOrDefault method. If we don't use the text named argument to pass the value of the content that we want to make bold, then it will just simply use the default one, meaning that it will use the content without any argument. So, if you are using the syntax [bold text="bold text"] you will get the same result. But the bold shortcode is also supporting content arguments. It means shortcodes using opening and closing tags can access their inner content. If you would like to use content arguments you can do something like [bold]bold text[/bold]. It will work because if the value of the text is null we will just use the value of the content variable that is the text between the opening and closing tags. Now let's see something else! If you navigate to Design in the admin UI, you will find a new option called Shortcode Templates! Let's see what a Shortcode Template is! Here you have the ability to actually write shortcodes in Liquid. Create a new one and call it Primary! This is about checking if your shortcode has something in the argument called text. If yes, we use the value of the text argument, if not, we are about to work with the content argument. The shortcode wraps the text in a span and adds the text-primary class to it. In this case, you can use this shortcode as you could see in the case of the shortcode called bold. But you also have the option to override the shortcodes that are implemented from code. In that case, you just need to call your shortcode template bold, and that will replace the existing one that has been written in code. If you would like to know more about shortcodes, don't forget to check out the demo on YouTube! Audit Trail Let's install your site using the Blog recipe. Then head to Configuration -> Features and enable the Audit Trail module. After you will see a new option in the menu of the admin UI called Audit Trail. The Audit Trail module provides log records for creation, deletion of any content type, and events like user events. So, let's do some content modification to see how you can use the Audit Trail feature! Navigate to New -> Article and publish a new Article content item with some data. Now edit some data in your newly created article and hit Publish again! Now navigate to the Audit Trail option on the menu and see the new records in the table. The audit trail table provides you with filtering and with pagination to be able to easily find the audit trail event that you are looking for. You can filter by a given date range, categories (All categories, Content Item, User), the user name of the user who caused the event to occur. Every record of the table can have a view in the Summary column. A record with the Content Item category shows you the version of the content item at the moment of recording. If you click on the Version X link you can see the read-only editor of the content item filled with the values that the content item has at that version. If you click on the display text of the content item you can edit the content item. Here you will see four recorded events regarding the changes that we have just made in the case of our article. The first one is about showing you the fact that we created the first version of the Article content type with the display text My new article. The second is about telling you that you clicked on the Publish button, that means you published that article. After you will see a Saved event. If you publish a new version of the article, Orchard Core first saves a new version of it (it also creates a new draft version), then publishes it. You can also see that now we have two different kinds of versions of this article. Now let's see what we have just changed in that article. To do that, click on the Details link of the Saved event. Here you can get more information about the given event. When you are checking the Detail view of a Content Item event you can see a table that contains the differences between the current version of the content item and the previous version of the content item in the Diff column. The values of the current content item will be shown in green, and the values of the previous content item will be shown here in red. You can show/hide this column using the Show diff switch. If you turn the Show before/after switch on, you will see two new columns: Before and After. These are about to show you the values of the properties of the previous version of the content item and the values of the properties of the current version of the content item. Here you can see we changed the Subtitle Text Field and the Html value of the HtmlBody Part of the article. If you navigate back to the audit trail table and check out the first Published event of the article content item, you will also see a new link here called Restore. If you click on this link, Orchard Core will create a new draft instance of the selected content item version. You can also restore the removed content items too. You can attach the AuditTrailPart content part to your content type that allows content editors to enter a comment to be saved into the audit trail event when saving a content item. This comment will be shown in the Comment column of the audit trail table. If you navigate to Configuration -> Settings -> Audit Trail you will find a list that contains every event that can you record using the Audit Trail module. Here you can enable or disable the recording of the given events. You can also enable client IP address logging. When you enable that, the client IP address will be recorded in audit trail event records. If you click on the Set blacklisted content types button you will see a new modal window with all of the defined content types in your system. Here you can select the content types that you don't want to log using the Audit Trail. For example, if you don't want to log the changes of the Article content items, then you may put a tick of the checkbox of the Article content type. The Trimming Settings is about to say how long you would like to keep the audit trail logs in the database. You can disable trimming if you would like to keep the records. And that's not the whole demo! If you are interested in the upcoming Audit Trail feature of Orchard Core, head to YouTube and check out the recording! News from the community A new website using Orchard Core Singapore is the third international country outside North America to introduce Starbucks to its discerning customers who readily embrace the Starbucks Experience. And they used Orchard Core to build the website for Starbucks Singapore! If you are interested in more websites using Orchard and Orchard Core, don't forget to visit Show Orchard. Show Orchard is a website for showing representative Orchard CMS (and now Orchard Core) websites all around the internet. It was started by Ryan Drew Burnett, but since he doesn't work with Orchard anymore, as announced earlier it is now maintained by our team at Lombiq Technologies. Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 154 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

The 100th This week in Orchard is here! In this post you could see a great demo about the CodeMirror improvements, we mention the updated Send Email activity, the new sample in our Orchard Core Training demo module about how to do unit testing, and many more! Thanks for joining us for the 100th time! Orchard Core updates Add Reply-To Header to Workflow EmailTask activity When you send an email to a subscriber and they click Reply, the reply message is typically sent to the email address listed in the From: header. A Reply-To address is identified by inserting the Reply-To header in your email. It is the email address that the reply message is sent when you want the reply to go to an email address that is different than the From: address. If you want to configure the Reply-To header in your EmailTask activity now you can do it! Just add the Send Email task to your workflow and use the updated editor of the activity! Allows ZoneShapes to be overridden If you were trying to override the ContentZone implementation in ZoneShapes.cs to get some different behavior for some tabbed shapes, it won't work, because it was not attributed with [Feature(Application.DefaultFeatureId)]. Just a note here: the [Application.DefaultFeatureId] attribute is used to allow core shapes to be overridden. Demos CodeMirror improvements CodeMirror in Orchard Core was a little bit outdated because it was not updated from quite a long time ago. All the views in Orchard Core have been changed that is using CodeMirror and now there is a new style called codemirror that is registered in the ResourceManifest.cs of the OrchardCore.Resources module. And that's not all, here you can see several other add-ons that are included by default. Here you can see the content of the TextField-CodeMirror.Edit.cshtml file. But let's see in action what can you do with these add-ons! When you are using HTML, you will have auto-close for the tags. If your text is too long, it will wrap the lines and the currently active line is being highlighted. And these features are provided by the newly added CodeMirror plugins. In this GIF you can see a Text Field and an HTML Field. We set the editor option to Code Mirror for the Text Field and Standard for the HTML Field. And as you could saw in the code above, you can turn on or off these features just by setting the values of the editor. If you don't want to have an auto-close tags feature, just simply say autoCloseTags: false. If you want to know more about the CodeMirror improvements, don't forget to check this recording on YouTube! News from the community Unit Testing in the Lombiq Training Demo for Orchard Core We added a new service and tests to it to learn a bit of unit testing! First, we'll create a service that we'll then later test in a test project. This service won't be used anywhere else, it's just an example to be tested. Why a service? Services are where usually most of the complex logic of an Orchard-based web app goes. You can test anything as long as you've written it in a testable way (by, for example, not utilizing hidden dependencies but injecting them all), you can write tests for controllers, drivers, background tasks, you name it. However, we think that unless you're aiming for 100% test coverage it's best to focus your unit and integration testing efforts on services. Then, the rest of the app can further automatically be tested via e.g. UI tests. Check out the service that will be tested here and here come the tests for it! This week in Orchard for the 100th time! We started our This week in Orchard series to inform our readers with the latest news and improvements around Orchard 1.x and Orchard Core. In this series we try to cover the most important features of the CMS and of course from time to time we are looking under the hood and show you the different code changes. But this series is not just for developers. We also want to target the super users of Orchard Core to know and be able to use every feature of it by learning the usage of the admin UI. Last year we started to upload Orchard Core demos in separate videos from the weekly podcasts to be able to find the given feature that you are really interested in as quickly as possible. We have also created a playlist for it on YouTube that contains more than 30 videos for now! And don't forget our Orchard Nuggets series that we have started in December last year! In that series, we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out these posts for bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have any questions! We hope that you like our series and find it useful! Thanks for reading us! 4000 stars on GitHub In GitHub, you can star repositories and topics to keep track of projects you find interesting and discover related content in your news feed. Starring a repository also shows appreciation to the repository maintainer for their work. Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a repository has. And we are proud to present that on June 22, the Orchard Core repository reached 4000 stars and it's still growing! Congratulations on the community! Using the admin UI of Orchard Core - Orchard Core Workshop 3 Last Saturday we did a workshop with 11 attendees about how to use the admin UI of Orchard Core! This Saturday we are gonna show you how to develop a module. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 151 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core RC 2 is now available! Check out this post to know everything about the latest release of Orchard Core. This week we will also show you a great demo about the brand new code snippets for Visual Studio, which will make your Orchard Core development more efficient! Orchard Core updates User menu as a shape There is a user menu at the top-right corner of the admin theme. In this menu, you could see the name of the logged-in user, and here is a button that you can use to log off. In the past, if you would like to change the look and feel of this menu, you had to override the whole Layout.cshtml file of the theme, because this was the file where we rendered the menu. From now there is a new shape called UserMenu, which is just about containing that piece of content that is responsible to display the user menu. So, if you would like to override that menu, just create a new Razor file in your admin theme called Usermenu.cshtml. Reviewing encoders usages There was a bug when you are sending an email, where your chars might be JSON-encoded. Let's say that you were using workflows to send a bunch of emails and in this case, Liquid is used to construct the body of the emails. You can have input data like "Country": "België" that you are rendering with {{order.UserProfile.Country}}<br />. However, workflow Liquid evaluator is using JavaScriptEncoder rather than HtmlEncoder. This results in an email with Belgi\u00EB in the body. By default when ASP.Net Core injects it's HTML helpers, it will encode all the Unicode chars. If you have any Unicode char, it will be encoded, which means you will not see the actual characters even if the browser supports Unicode characters. To prevent that you can configure the WebEncoderOptions in your web application to say that the TextEncoderSettings will accept all Unicode ranges. That means it will don't encode anything that is based on Unicode ranges. It will still encode HTML, but any char that is a Unicode char will still be returned as a Unicode char and not as an HTML entity or a URL entity or a JSON entity and so on. It's better to just opt-in for the ranges you want, but in this case, it's just a sample code to show you how you can do that. If you look at your source code when you use such chars, you will see you will have lots of HTML entities instead of the chars you wrote. Once you do that, it could be the actual chars. And also, when you are using an encoder, just resolve it in the constructor, because the encoders are registered in the DI using the mentioned arguments. If you don't want to use the arguments (TextEncoderSettings) for a custom piece of code, then don't resolve the encoder, use HtmlEncoder.Default. For more information, check out the documentation! Demos Orchard Core code snippets for Visual Studio Orchard Dojo Library is a portable package of coding and training guidelines, development utilities. These are also part of the best practices and guidelines we use at Lombiq. This library contains Visual Studio code snippets to quickly generate code in some common scenarios during the Orchard Core module and theme development. To effectively use this collection of VS snippets just point the Snippets Manager to where you cloned or downloaded this folder. To do this go under Tools → Code Snippets Manager → select the C# language → Add and Add the whole folder. For Razor snippets to also work select the HTML Language and do the same. Do note that Razor snippets will only be suggested when you hit Ctrl + space first. You can download the snippets from this GitHub repository. For example, if you type oc, the IntelliSense in Visual Studio will show you the suggestions. In the screen below you could see the code that is generated if you are using the ocmigrations snippet. That is about generating a class that implements the DataMigration abstract class and you will also get a Create method, that is the minimum requirement if you would like to add a migration. But that's not all! Check out this recording to see more snippets in action! News from the community Orchard Core RC 2 released We are thrilled to announce that Orchard Core RC 2 is now available! There is a new blog post in Orchard Core Blog that shows you the new features of the latest release. Here you could find the content localization support, and pre-configured localized Setup experience, the improved block content management experience, sitemaps management, and Azure support improvements. The NuGet packages are also updated on nuget.org. It's still prerelease of Orchard Core (the last one), so if you would like to update the packages in your solution, don't forget to put a tick in the Include prerelease checkbox if you are using Visual Studio. And don't forget the Roadmap! Here you could see a list of the fully or partially implemented features and the plans for the future releases! Upgrade your solution to RC 2 now! Feel free to drop on the dedicated Gitter chat and ask questions! Lombiq Utility Scripts Our Utility Scripts project is now open source! Many scripts for Orchard Core, Orchard CMS, Azure, SqlServer development. E.g. quick Orchard Core solution init, reset/reinstall. Head to the GitHub repository to see all the included scripts! Lombiq's Open-Source Orchard Core Extensions is now updated to RC 2 Looking for some useful Orchard Core extensions? Here's a bundle solution of all of Lombiq's open-source Orchard Core extensions (modules and themes). This repository contains the Helpful Libraries for Orchard Core that includes DateTime Libraries with TimeZone conversion, Localization Libraries and many more! But it also contains the Vue.js module for Orchard Core, the Training Demo module and that's not all of it! A new blog post about Orchard Core Nuno Cancelo is a software Engineer, eager to learn, and even more to share knowledge. Last week he published a great post about the basics of Orchard Core and he planned to publish 3 more parts where he will write about how you can create a module, a recipe, and a theme. Don't hesitate and start this journey now! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in the coming months, between May and September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Lombiq's developers will also give two workshops, on using Orchard from the admin UI and on developing a module. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 148 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

This week we prepared with two new demos: the Taxonomy Localization and the Orchard Core OpenAPI Code Generation Tools based on NSwag! But before doing that, let's see the latest changes that will be added to the RC2 release of Orchard Core that is now really just a few days ahead! Orchard Core updates Refactor Blog recipe to have fewer required fields You may found that creating blog posts in Orchard Core using the Blog recipe could be not very user friendly. When you create a new blog post, you have to provide tags and select the category for the posts, however, you will also need to add a banner image for it. These are all required fields, without these, you cannot publish your post. But from now these fields are optional and the Markdown editor is just below the Title and the Permalink, so you don't need to scroll down to start typing your new exciting post! Add ConfirmationEmailSubject to RegisterUserTask When you are dealing with workflows you can find a task called Register User. This is about register a user from a form field, meaning that the activity is getting the request body as a form to get an IFormCollection and try to get the UserName and Email values from that. If everything goes fine, the task will register the user and if you edit the activity, you will find some more stuff to set up! Here you can say to send a confirmation email to the user with a given subject and you can also use a template for the confirmation email if you want! How to contribute to the Orchard Core documentation? Have you ever thought about contributing to the Orchard Core documentation, but you cannot find a line about how to do that? Well, here comes the good news! From now, you will find a new guide in the documentation that tells you everything that you need to know to add your great getting started guides, tutorials, and everything to the documentation! Thank you for doing that! Change content API permissions You want anonymous users to be able to view your site, view your page/content item and it would just show what the layout is or the view is. But you might not want anonymous users to retrieve the full content item JSON payload, because it might shows some properties and metadata that you don't want to expose. For that, you could use the custom permission called GetApiContent that you can assign to specific roles and this is not assigned to anonymous users by default. Now, this permission was renamed to AccessContentApi and protects all /api/content methods. If you don't want a user to see all the fields, just don't grant access to the APIs at all, hence the GetApiContent permission is not required as a separate one. This will also protect POST that currently returns the full content. And one more thing: the GetApiContent was already added to the Authenticated role. Now it's removed from that role as being authenticated should not grant access to all fields. Prevent array duplication when merging existing content When you do Merge using JSON.Net it will just merge the different arrays. In some cases, it's not what you want. If you want an array to be replaced (for example an array of tags) then it will just add a new tag to that array and not replacing the array with a new array. On the POST operation of the API, you just want to replace the value and the PATCH operation should be the one that merges different arrays in this case. So, the Content ApiController needs to use ArrayHandling.Replace when updating existing content, or array values are duplicated. Here you can see the changed code and here comes the UpdateJsonMergeSettings: private static readonly JsonMergeSettings UpdateJsonMergeSettings = new JsonMergeSettings { MergeArrayHandling = MergeArrayHandling.Replace }; Demos Taxonomy Localization Have you ever wondered how to localize your taxonomy terms in Orchard Core? Well, it could be hard to do it for the first time, but if you are watching the following recording you can get some tips and tricks to reach your goal faster! Orchard Core OpenAPI Code Generation Tools based on NSwag Head to GitHub and clone the master branch of the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi repository. Make sure that the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.Sample project is your starting project then just simply build and run the solution. When setting up your site don't forget to use the Open API Sample recipe to enable the needed modules and theme. If you navigate to https://localhost:44300/swagger, you will see the endpoints that are available in Orchard Core and a sample controller named Foo that comes from the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.SampleModule module. Here you can make queries on them and now we will also get schemas that are generated using the NSwag toolchain! Let's check for example the BlogPostItemDto! Now we can use those! The samples folder contains a console client that you can use to try the endpoints. You can simply open the solution with Visual Studio (ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.ConsoleClient.sln) and fire up the ThisNetWorks.OrchardCore.OpenApi.ConsoleClient project. This is about calling the endpoints by using a static HttpClient. Open the Program.cs file and check the first few lines of the Main method here. You could see that we are getting a content item by the 4qnhdhv3z54xk4fg4tdfke76c9 and we get the content of the content item in the FooTextItemDto object. The content item with the mentioned ID is a content item of the Foo text content type, which has got one Text Field attached, named Foo Field. Our client modifies the text of this field and making a POST request to send the updated data to Orchard Core. Now if you read back from the API you will get the updated content item with the new text in the Foo Field. But there is a lot more than that! You can see that you can get the RecentBlogPosts Lucene query and use the response data, or do other Lucene queries (like give me all the blog posts) and so on. If you are interested in it, there is also a TypeScript client (tsClient.ts) which has the same kind of classes and can be used directly from TypeScript. Of course, before doing that, you have to do the authentication, get the token, and so on. For that, you have to enable the OpenID module and configure it. It also comes with the recipe by default. The back-end, the Swagger is using Authorization Code Flow, and the console client is using Client Credentials Flow. The client app has a specific API role because it's relevant to just give very limited and specific access to the system. And that's not all of it! If you need more details about the project, don't forget to check the recording on YouTube! News from the community Orchard Nuggets: How to access services from another tenant in Orchard Core? Do you run a multi-tenant Orchard Core site? Have you ever wondered how you can cross tenant boundaries? We show you the code! Check out our latest Orchard Nugget post for more! Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard tips and let us know if you'd have another question! Updated Dojo library We've updated the famous Dojo Library to Orchard Core! Orchard Dojo is a portable package of coding and training guidelines, development utilities. Check out our updated library and start learning today! Orchard Core workshops The contributors of Orchard Core will hold some unique online workshops in the coming months, between May and September 2020. So even with Orchard Harvest postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic we'll get some new learning events. Lombiq's developers will also give two workshops, on using Orchard from the admin UI and on developing a module. Are you looking to get up to speed with Orchard? Check out the workshops' details on the Orchard Core homepage! Orchard Dojo Newsletter Now we have 146 subscribers of the Lombiq's Orchard Dojo Newsletter! We have started this newsletter to inform the community around Orchard with the latest news about the platform. By subscribing to this newsletter, you will get an e-mail whenever a new post published to Orchard Dojo, including This week in Orchard of course. Do you know of other Orchard enthusiasts who you think would like to read our weekly articles? Tell them to subscribe here! If you are interested in more news around Orchard and the details of the topics above, don't forget to check out the recording of this week's Orchard meeting!

You have several options to send an HTTP request to an external API in Orchard Core, but maybe you haven't tried the Http Request Task. Let's see quickly how you can hook up a workflow! The HTTP Request Task comes from the HTTP Workflows Activities feature, so before doing anything, don't forget the enable that module. Now navigate to the Workflows option from the menu and hit Create Workflow Type to add your workflow. JSONPlaceholder is a nice fake online REST API that you can use whenever you need some fake data. It comes with a set of 6 common resources and we are going to use the first one and making a GET HTTP request to get 100 user posts in a JSON format. Choose the Add Task button in the Workflow editor and select the HTTP Request one from the HTTP category. Here you can see a nice editor where you can provide the details of your request. We added a custom title to our activity as Get 100 posts. The URL will be the URL provided by the JSONPlaceholder API. To get the posts we have to make a GET request. If you would like to add a new post, make a POST request to the same endpoint, and provide the body to send. Don't forget to handle the 201 HTTP response code, because this will be the number that will show you that you are good to go and the server faked that your content was created. You may notice that you can type Liquid code everywhere in this editor. Let's say that the title of our new post will be the name of our site. To do that, we can pass the {{ Site.SiteName }} Liquid expression. As we mentioned, we get 201 if everything goes well. If the server returned with anything else, then something bad happened and we should handle that in our workflow of course. To handle the failed requests, we can use the Unhandled HTTP Status branch of the HTTP Request Task (we named in Create a new post) and notice the user somehow. OK, it's not a useful workflow, because we are only dealing with the response codes, but not with the response body. But how can we use the response details? To find the answer we have to check the source code of the HTTP Request Task activity and take a look at the ExecutyAsync method. Here you can see that the code uses the LastResult of the workflowContext and the LastResult has a Body property where you can find the response body itself. The LastResult property of the WorkflowExecutionContext is an object, that means you can easily put everything into the LastResult, but it could be a little bit harder to get the content from it. public override async Task<ActivityExecutionResult> ExecuteAsync(WorkflowExecutionContext workflowContext, ActivityContext activityContext) { using (var httpClient = new HttpClient()) { var headersText = await _expressionEvaluator.EvaluateAsync(Headers, workflowContext); var headers = ParseHeaders(headersText); foreach (var header in headers) { httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.TryAddWithoutValidation(header.Key, header.Value); } var httpMethod = HttpMethod; var url = await _expressionEvaluator.EvaluateAsync(Url, workflowContext); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(new HttpMethod(httpMethod), url); var postMethods = new[] { HttpMethods.Patch, HttpMethods.Post, HttpMethods.Put }; if (postMethods.Any(x => string.Equals(x, httpMethod, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))) { var body = await _expressionEvaluator.EvaluateAsync(Body, workflowContext); var contentType = await _expressionEvaluator.EvaluateAsync(ContentType, workflowContext); request.Content = new StringContent(body, Encoding.UTF8, contentType); } var response = await httpClient.SendAsync(request, HttpCompletionOption.ResponseContentRead); var responseCodes = ParseResponseCodes(HttpResponseCodes); var outcome = responseCodes.FirstOrDefault(x => x == (int)response.StatusCode); workflowContext.LastResult = new { Body = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(), Headers = response.Headers.ToDictionary(x => x.Key), StatusCode = response.StatusCode, ReasonPhrase = response.ReasonPhrase, IsSuccessStatusCode = response.IsSuccessStatusCode }; return Outcomes(outcome != 0 ? outcome.ToString() : "UnhandledHttpStatus"); } } Imagine you are implementing a custom activity that creates content items based on the response body. For that, you need to get the JSON then serialize it to a typed class. That makes the data easier to work with. In the ExecutyAsync method of your custom activity you can get the JSON like: var responseBody = workflowContext.LastResult.GetType().GetProperty("Body").GetValue(workflowContext.LastResult).ToString(); Here the responseBody variable will contain a JSON in a string. You may notice that the value of the title here is Orchard Core, which comes from the {{ Site.SiteName }} Liquid value. To deserialize the response to typed classes you can use the built-in Json.NET package in Orchard Core and for instance, use the JsonConvert.DeserializeObject method of it. And that's it, now do what you want with the data. Did you like this post? It's part of our Orchard Core Nuggets series where we answer common Orchard questions, be it about user-facing features or developer-level issues. Check out the other posts for more such bite-sized Orchard Core tips and let us know if you have another question!