Monthly Archives: February 2018

Switching to the DXA 2 model service in your DD4T application

On February 12th, SDL released DXA 2.0, the shiny new version of the Digital Experience Accelerator. Part of this new version is a new REST service called the model service, which is able to return content quicker, and in a leaner format. Not only that, the model service is also able to resolve links in the content on the fly. This is an important improvement, because link resolving is one of the most expensive operations in DXA as well as DD4T.

A full migration of your application from DD4T to DXA is far from trivial, at least not with the DXA 2.0 release that is currently out. But there is good news: it is very easy to start using the DXA model service in your DD4T .NET application (it is also possible with a Java DD4T application, but we’ll discuss that some other time). Your application is likely to become faster because of it.

There is one important condition: you have to use SDL Web 8.1 or higher, and DD4T 2.0 or higher, in order to upgrade to the model service.

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SDL Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA) 2.0 released

This week SDL announced the release of Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA) 2.0, after already making available two “Community Technology Preview” releases last year. Among several other changes, DXA 2.0 introduces the DXA Model Service, a Content Delivery microservice supporting the R2 data model. The new release is another milestone towards fully merging DD4T and DXA, as announced at Tridion Developer Summit in 2016.

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DD4T Custom ViewModel attributes

Customer Use case

Our customer had a requirement to send some HTTP headers with the last publication date of the page in it, in order to optimize browser caching. For this reason we needed to include the last published date from Tridion in our DD4T PageModel.

Context

The DD4T ViewModel functionality lacks the option to include the last publish date. Fortunately, you can create your own attributes.

In this blog I will show you how easy it is to create a custom attribute to include the last publish date of a page in your models. Continue reading