Ektron Developer's Guide: Building an Ektron Powered Website

Appendix B. Framework API

The Framework API is the newest member of the API set that Ektron includes with CMS400 .NET. It was added to promote discoverability and consistency. Discoverability means that a developer should be able to guess the namespace, object name, and method to use without having to read through huge amounts of documentation. With a well designed API, users should be able to intuit their way through a situation using context clues delivered by the naming of objects and IntelliSense.

For consistency, the goal was to make the API work in similar ways for similar functions. Therefore, it should be easy to understand how to work with a given object because it works in the same way as other objects you have already used. The final goal was to make the API simple to use. It should make easy things easy to do, while steering developers down the path of having easily maintainable code that follows best practices, without needing to keep a large number of rules in mind.

This appendix discusses some of the overall themes of the Framework API, and then jumps into a few snippets demonstrating how to achieve some typical simple goals.

WORKING WITH THE FRAMEWORK API

There are two points to understand before you can effectively work with the Framework API. The first is how the API interacts with the underlying permission model, and the second is the overall construction of the API. For the Framework API, the permissions flag is set when the API objects are initially created, by ...