When I released CMSImport 1.0 two months ago, I briefly described the FieldAdapters feature that  I was going to build for version 1.1. Today I want to go more into detail about the FieldAdapters feature for CMSImport.

The problem

The reason I started to think about fieldadapters was because I wanted to solve a very common problem. As you might know Umbraco only accepts three kinds of  data; string, integer and datetime. What happens when you try to map a boolean value to  a yes/no Umbraco datatype? An exception is thrown.  The following screenshot contains several products that we want to import into Umbraco.

When we’ve mapped the InStore column to a yes/no datatype the import will fail because it can’t map the boolean value to a 0 or 1 and we will see the following ugly screen

And a FieldAdapter can fix that?

Yes a fieldadapter inspects the value and tries to parse it, in this case it will try to pares a true/false value to 1/0, best to explain by exploring the source code. The whole feature is based on the new IFieldAdapter interface.

          using System; namespace CMSImportLibrary.Interfaces
{ /// <summary>///
Implement the IFieldAdapter interface to convert an mallformed field to a correct
type./// </summary>publicinterface IFieldAdapter
{ /// <summary>///
Contains the GUID of the datatype we want to parse using this FieldAdapter///
</summary> Guid DataTypeId { get;
} /// <summary>///
Parse the data /// </summary>///
<param name="value">The value to parse</param>///
<returns></returns>object Parse(objectvalue);
} }

As you can see in the code snippet the interface contains the property DataTypeId. The value needs to correspondent to the Id (GUID) of the datatype you are creating the fieldadapter for. During the import a factory inspects the underlying datatype of the document property, if a fieldadapter is found it will execute  the Parse method. This will work on all Umbraco datatypes (also custom datatypes or datatypes from third party packages) as long as you know the Id of the datatype. You can find the id by opening the datatype in Umbraco, there you see the RenderControl .

When opening the source code of the rendercontrol you’ll see the Id of the datatype (a GUID). Don’t worry if you can’t open the source code of the datatype i’ll add the Id’s of all known datatypes to the documentation of CMSImport and I’ll make a free tool that shows the Id of any datatype.

Implementation of the BooleanFieldAdapter

Now enough with all the boring stuff, let’s see the fieldadapter in action. Below you’ll see the implementation of the BooleanFieldAdapter. I’ve mapped the id of the True/false datatype to the DataTypeId property so CMSImport knows that it needs to call the Parse method during the mapping of a yes/no document property. In the Parse method I simply check if the value is already in the correct format , if not it will try to convert the value to 1 or 0 and return that , otherwise it will just return the original value.

          using System; using CMSImportLibrary.Interfaces; namespace CMSImportLibrary.FieldAdapters.DefaultFieldAdapters
{ publicclass BooleanFieldAdapter
: IFieldAdapter { #region IFieldAdapter Members public Guid
DataTypeId { get { returnnew Guid("38b352c1-e9f8-4fd8-9324-9a2eab06d97a");
} } publicobject Parse(objectvalue)
{ if (!(value.Equals("0")
|| value.Equals("1")))
{ bool boolValue = false; if (bool.TryParse(value.ToString(), out boolValue))
{ return boolValue ? 1 : 0; } } returnvalue;
} #endregion } }

Now when we run the import  again it will just import the data without any errors, just by adding a few lines of code, isn’t that powerful?

Beyond fixing problems

Now that we have this mechanism we can also use it to modify data during the import. Let’s say we import a piece of content from an old site that contains an image tag. This will just run fine but when you have a reference to an image on your old site and  you delete that old site all the references to the images are dead. FieldAdapters can help solve this issue by inspecting the text, extract the image tags, import these images into the media library and update the image tag with a reference to the media item. This will really help keep your site consistent. The same applies for Upload fields.

Will all of this be included in the free version of CMSImport also?

All FieldAdapters that fix errors (Like the BooleanFieldAdapter) will be included into the free version of CMSImport. FieldAdapters that helps you updating the content will only be included in the PRO version of CMSImport. And again you can also create your own FieldAdapters, free for both versions.

This will be the major feature of the V1.1 release of CMSImport. Please let me know what you think about this feature.

I’m very pleased to announce that CMSImport 1.0.3 is released. Now I can hear you think CMSImport? Must be a fork of the great UmbImport package. No this isn’t the case. A few weeks back Niels (AKA @Umbraco) asked me to change the name since Umbraco HQ got a lot of requests about this package. So now the name is CMSImport and that’s not going to change anymore.

CMSImport PRO

Finally we’ve finished our commercial edition of CMSImport.  CMSImport PRO gives you all the options of the default package and the following extra features:

• Update Content
• Save Import Steps
• Schedule imports for a certain time and day

Pricing

You can buy a single domain license of CMSImport. With a single domain license you are allowed to use  CMSImport PRO for a single domain and all subdomains, such as www.example.com, accept.example.com, and local.example.com.

We also have a Enterprise license available. With an Enterprise license you are allowed to install the CMSImport PRO on unlimited production web servers, and use it for unlimited Umbraco instances within the Enterprise. 

A single domain license will be available for  99 Euro, an enterpise license for 389 euro.

When you buy a license you’ll get free updates within 90 days of purchase and  free updates for all minor releases within a major release.  For example, if you purchased a  1.0 version of CMSImport, you get free updates of all 1.x versions through our client area.

Special 1.0 offer.When you buy the 1.0 release you’ll get a free update to 2.x. This is a 1.0 offer only!

What’s more in this release?

Several issues are solved in this release(both in the free and Pro release):

• "item with the same key already added" error when using duplicate column names
• Automapping column names
• The imported document creator is not always the administrator anymore. It's using the logged in user now. When you schedule an import you can select the user that should be used as the creator of the document
• Special characters in CSV are now supported, we’ve changed the reader from ANSI text to Unicode
• Sometimes CSV replaced spaces with empty strings, this is solved now
• With member import you can now merge any member property into the template. Simply surround the member property with [#(property here)]
• Using a renamed Umbraco folder. This is possible now, although it will be better to change it after install, otherwise you have to install manually.
• We’ve removed the limitation to allow only one DataAdapter. We are thinking to build a DataAdapter pack which contains adapters to import from wordpress, Rss, Outlook, excel etc. These adapters will be available for free in the Commercial Edition and for a small fee for the Free edition.

Roadmap

In the 1.x version we will add the following functionality:

• FieldAdapters. Sounds boring but this is a big thing. When you import data now, sometimes the import will fail. For example if you import boolean as text (true/false) and want to store that in a True/False field in Umbraco it will fail. Umbraco expects that the value will be 0/1. FieldAdapters will solve this problem. If a insert of data fails. CMSImport will check if 1 o more FieldAdapters are available to convert the data in the right format. This will be added to version 1.1 which must be ready before CodeGarden 2010.
• Dictionary Import. Need I say more?
• Hierarchical imports(PRO only).

In the 2.x version we will add the following functionality:

• Hierarchical import support in Data Adapters. Not the same as the 1.x Hierarchicalimport feature ;-)
• Export/import definitions (PRO only). An easy way to deploy Import definitions

More Info

For more info, download, or purchase you’ll go to http://www.cmsimport.com/