Introduction

EPiFields is an add-on function to EPiServer, which gives editors/authors the possibility to insert variable data into the Editor. This is especially useful when you want to show data from other systems on a normal EPiServer page. EPiFields can also be used to add content to pages that are modified from a central location. This might be legal information or information that changes often (and that can be found in many places on the Web site).

EPiFields requires EPiServer 4.40 or later.

EPiFields

EPiFields is delivered as two packages - EPiFields and EPiFields Samples pack. EPiFields by itself does not provide any functionality. It only adds the base on which new EPiFields adapters can be added. (An adapter is another word for the function provided.) The Sample pack includes some prebuilt adapters for different use:

Current date/time
Current user
Meta data for current page (Name, Created etc)

View data from SQL source
View data from XML source
View data from HTML source

Phrase viewer
Show info with timer 

The Data Viewer and the Data Provider

An important part of the EPiFields Sample pack is the integration functionality. We provide a way to view data in EPiServer from different data sources. In the package we have created three different Data Providers: SQL provider, XML provider and HTML provider. Each one of them delivers data in a structured manner and they can be consumed by any Data Viewer. The SQL and XML providers are rather straightforward as they normally are used to deliver raw data. The HTML data provider can be used when you need to show data that is not arranged in a structured way. It could, for example, fetch data from another Web-based backend system and deliver it as structured data for a viewer to consume. The normal way of using the HTML provider is to fetch a small part of a page and show it through EPiFields using the SimplePageView viewer. 

The viewer can show data as a table, as a news list, as a single HTML block, as a line chart or as a block chart. See some samples below:

News list built on data from XML source.

Info list based on HTML source.

Table based on data from HTML source.

Simple line chart based on SQL source. 

Installation

To install EPiFields and EPiFields Sample Pack, download the software and follow the instructions under EPiFields Installation.