Sometimes you, as a developer, might want to do more direct queries against the assets in Digizuite DAM. Maybe you want to:
Offer a listing of product white papers available for download that updates dynamically
Show an archive of videos for the current target audience
Give the end user access to direct free text search in certain assets
Have a gallery or a slider that automatically selects images marked in your DAM for that purpose by your image editor.
In cases such as these you might want to consider doing a custom query for assets. Luckily the Optimizely/Digizuite integration is prepared for this and supports it fully.
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Querying
In order to search, you basically have to construct an AssetQueryParameters object.
This will specify all the important parameters of your search. These are some of the parameters you can set:
FreeText (string). A free text search query. By default this will do a free text search against the title, description, keywords and note field - but it can of course be configured.
Facets (List<FacetRequest>). Any additional fields to filter for.
Limit (int). How many assets to return.
QueryCacheDuraction (TimeSpan). The timespan to cache the results for. This is very important in order to ensure decent performance on your site and DAM Center. This can also be set through the method CacheFor.
When you have constructed a complete AssetQueryParameters object, you can use it in the DigizuiteClient.Search(AssetQueryParametres) method. This will return an IEnumerable<IContent> that in turn can be cast to whatever type you expect.
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When we display this to the editors in edit-mode, this is what they'll see:
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The folder selection can actually be dragged directly over from the Digizuite folder structure.
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| Code Block | ||
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protected override IViewComponentResult InvokeComponent(GalleryBlock currentContent)
{
GalleryBlockViewModel gvm = new GalleryBlockViewModel();
gvm.CurrentBlock = currentContent;
AssetQueryParameters aqm = new AssetQueryParameters();
aqm.FoldersToSearch = currentContent.Folders ?? new List<ContentReference>();
aqm.Limit = currentContent.MaxNumberOfAssets;
aqm.Page = 1;
aqm.AssetTypes = GlobalConstants.AssetTypes.Image.MakeIntList();
aqm.CropName = currentContent.CropName;
aqm.OptionalFilters = new Dictionary<string, string>();
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(currentContent.FreeText)) aqm.FreeText = currentContent.FreeText;
gvm.Images = _client.Search(aqm.CacheFor(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1))).Cast<IDigizuiteImage>().ToList();
return View(gvm);
} |
Notice how we also make sure to set a cache timeout of 1 minute when doing the searching? That ensures a pretty updated image list, while not cause load to the DAM server for every page view. We could probably safely increase this number a lot.
We also ensure that we will only search for images. AssetTypes.Image (from Digizuite.Episerver.Constants) is a constant int, set to the default Image Asset Type ID. The view is basically just about rendering the gallery, with the addition of rendering the images in the selected media format as described here: DFO 4.0.0 - 4 Referencing and Rendering Assets. Here is what the end result could look like:
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