A Simple Page Import Web Service

In EPiServer CMS 5 there's a couple of very useful Web Services that gives you pretty thorough access to do just about anything you please - at least with regards to adding / searching / modifying pages.

However the Web Services can be pretty complex and at times a green newbie like myself needs a quick & dirty way of importing files from another system into EPiServer without doing too much thinking. In fact, I found myself in exactly that situation recently, when I wanted to import a huge amount of test data I had scavenged on the net (19040 pages to be exact). So I ended up writing a new little web service that takes the following parameters:

• ParentID - The ID of the page that should be the parent of the page you're adding
• PageType - The name of the page type to create
• PageXML - A string of XML, defining the page.The tag-names should match the page properties you want to set, and they should all be wrapped in a <page> </page> tag. So something like "<page><pagename>My Page</pagename><bodyField>This is the body</bodyField></page>"
• Publish - A boolean parameter that specifies if the page should be published instantly.

The Web method then returns the page-id of the page created, thereby enabling you to build your own page-hierarchy.

In order to make it, I simply created a new standard Web Service in Visual Studio, set the following Using clauses:

using EPiServer;
using EPiServer.DataAccess;
using EPiServer.Core;
using EPiServer.DataAbstraction;
using System.Xml;
using EPiServer.Security;

and added this method to the Web Service class:

[WebMethod]
public int ImportPage(int ParentID, string PageType, string PageXML, bool Publish)
{
    XmlDocument xd = new XmlDocument();
    xd.LoadXml(PageXML);
    PageData pd = DataFactory.Instance.GetDefaultPageData(new PageReference(ParentID), PageType,AccessLevel.NoAccess);
    //Fill in properties
    foreach (XmlNode xn in xd.DocumentElement.ChildNodes)
    {
        if (xn is XmlElement)
        {
            string name = (xn as XmlElement).Name;
            try
            {
                pd[name] = (xn as XmlElement).InnerText;
            }
            catch { }
        }
    }

    PageReference pr=DataFactory.Instance.Save(pd, (Publish)? SaveAction.Publish:SaveAction.Save,AccessLevel.NoAccess);
    return pr.ID;
}

 

So, basically it creates a page with default data, iterates through the 1st level nodes and checks if there is a matching page property. This is a really simple example without any proper error handling, and which only supports string properties. The only thing that's worth noting is how I use the AccessLevel.NoAccess in the Save method and the GetDefaultPageData method, to avoid uncomfortable access checks (since the web service typically runs as an anonymous user). However, make sure always to put the service behind access-control (which can be set up in web.config).

 

And yes, the import of my 19k pages went surprisingly well - and pretty quick too!