Command templates – the forgotten feature of Sitecore 6?

I don’t know about you, but I actually haven’t been giving command templates any attention since they were introduced in Sitecore 6. This is really a shame, as it is pretty powerful and can help editors a lot.

For instance take the often used structure for news, where you have a news folder. To avoid too many items in a flat structure you have folders for the current year and the current month. This could back in the old days be used by letting the editors them self create the folders they needed or you could have implemented a lot of event handlers or similar. Now you can just use a command template and let the command create the folders from the current DateTime.

To create command templates follow the guide in the data definition cookbook . Then implement the command to create the folders like this:

public class MyCustomCommand : Command
{
  public override void Execute(CommandContext context)
  {
  if (context.Items.Length == 1)
  {
  Item item = context.Items[0];
  NameValueCollection parameters = new NameValueCollection();
  parameters["id"] = item.ID.ToString();
  parameters["language"] = item.Language.ToString();
  parameters["database"] = item.Database.Name;
  Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.Start(this, "Run", parameters);
  }
}

protected void Run(Sitecore.Web.UI.Sheer.ClientPipelineArgs args)
{
  if (!args.IsPostBack)
  {
    //Means we are in the initial step, we want to ask for the name of the news
    Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Input("Enter the name of the news item:", Sitecore.Globalization.Translate.Text("New NewsItem"), Sitecore.Configuration.Settings.ItemNameValidation, "'$Input' is not a valid name.", 100);
    args.WaitForPostBack();
  }
  else
  {
    //Now we got a postback, which means we got a response
    if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(args.Result) && args.Result != "undefined")
    {
      Database db = Sitecore.Configuration.Factory.GetDatabase(args.Parameters["database"]);
      Item parent = db.GetItem(args.Parameters["id"], Language.Parse(args.Parameters["language"]));
      //Create the folder structure if it doesn't exist
      string year = DateTime.Now.Year.ToString();
      string month = DateTime.Now.Month.ToString();
      TemplateItem folderTemplate = db.Templates[Sitecore.TemplateIDs.Folder];
      Item yearFolder = parent.Children[year];
      if (yearFolder == null)
        yearFolder = parent.Add(year, folderTemplate);
      Item monthFolder = yearFolder.Children[month];
      if (monthFolder == null)
        monthFolder = yearFolder.Add(month, folderTemplate);
      //Create the news Item
      TemplateItem template = Sitecore.Context.ContentDatabase.Templates[new ID("{B2612CF6-16D6-426D-9E74-EE3A4E3989B2}")];
      Item item = monthFolder.Add(args.Result, template);
      //Load the Item in the content editor
      Sitecore.Context.ClientPage.SendMessage(this, "item:load(id=" + item.ID.ToString() + ")");
    }
  }
 }
}

There you go – auto creation of folders. It’s that simple. I can think of really many usages of this – also more complex situations. Too bad the sheer UI documentation is so limited, as it makes it difficult to implement complex wizards etc.