Switching to the DXA 2 model service in your DD4T application

ASP.NET MVC, DD4T, Tridion

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

DD4T, Tridion

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

ASP.NET MVC, DD4T, Tridion, ViewModels

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 →

Changes in DD4T 2.1 for Java

DD4T, Spring MVC,

Version 2.1 of DD4T has seen many improvements and changes with respect to the DD4T 2.0.X branch. While most changes are compatible with 2.0.X, it is recommended to upgrade your web application to the 2.1.X version. The main reason is that the 2.0.X releases will be discontinued and active development on it has stopped. Additionally, new versions of the DD4T Template Building Blocks may push new data formats or properties to the front end and these will only be incorporated in the DD4T 2.1 branch. New implementations are further encouraged to use the latest version, even if you already have published DD4T 1.0 XML or DD4T 2.0.X / 2.1.X Json in your Broker database, in order make use of the latest support for libraries, Tridion and fixed issues.

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