Docs > Content Management >

Entity Versioning

Both pages and custom entities support versioning, so you work on an entity in draft status before publishing it to the live site. A historical record of changes are kept so that you can revert to a previous version if need be.

Working with versioned entities

For the most part versioning is managed automatically. The admin UI will show the latest version and when editing pages in the visual editor Cofoundry will load the correct version and display the block data associated with the version being edited.

For parts of your site where you're manually loading data you'll want to make sure you're loading a version of the data that the user expects to see.

Examples of this might be for relation data manually loaded into a page block, or perhaps a standalone part of your site like a navigation menu loaded via a ViewComponent.

PublishStatusQuery

Cofoundry queries that support versioned data will usually include a PublishStatusQuery parameter that you can use to load the appropriate version of your data.

The good news is that the default value is always PublishStatusQuery.Published which ensures that you're never accidentally exposing unpublished data on your live site.

There's a few other values to the PublishStatusQuery enum, but the common one that you'll need to be aware of is PublishStatusQuery.Latest which can be used to get the latest version of an entity irrespective of whether it has been published or not.

Querying related data from a page block mapper

Firstly we'll look at page blocks, which could load in page or custom entity data. I'll use the Page Snippet block type from the PageBlockTypes sample project as an example.

In the display model mapper we need to load in the page that has been selected by the user by running a GetPageRenderDetailsByIdRangeQuery. Cofoundry makes this really simple for us here because the correct PublishStatusQuery for loading related entities is passed into the MapAsync method and all we need to do is pass it into our query constructor.

public class PageSnippetDisplayModelMapper : IPageBlockTypeDisplayModelMapper<PageSnippetDataModel>
{
    // … constructor ommited

    public async Task<IEnumerable<PageBlockTypeDisplayModelMapperOutput>> MapAsync(
        IReadOnlyCollection<PageBlockTypeDisplayModelMapperInput<PageSnippetDataModel>> inputCollection, 
        PublishStatusQuery publishStatusQuery
        )
    {
        var allPageIds = inputCollection.SelectDistinctModelValuesWithoutEmpty(m => m.PageId);

        // We pass through the PublishStatusQuery to ensure this is respected
        // when querying related data i.e. if we're viewing a draft version then
        // we should also be able to see connected entities in draft status.
        var pagesQuery = new GetPageRenderDetailsByIdRangeQuery(allPageIds, publishStatusQuery);
        var allPages = await _pageRepository.GetPageRenderDetailsByIdRangeAsync(pagesQuery);
        var results = new List<PageBlockTypeDisplayModelMapperOutput>(inputCollection.Count);

        foreach (var input in inputCollection)
        {
            var output = new PageSnippetDisplayModel();
            var page = allPages.GetOrDefault(input.DataModel.PageId);

            // We have to code defensively here and bear in mind that the related
            // entities may be in draft status and may not be available when viewing
            // the live site.
            if (page != null)
            {
                // … mapping ommited
            }
            
            results.Add(input.CreateOutput(output));
        }

        return results;
    }
}

When mapping custom entity display models, the mapper works in exactly the same way as for block mappers, the correct PublishStatusQuery for related entities is passed into the MapDisplayModelAsync method. All you need to do is reference it from any queries you make to related entities that support versioning.

For non-Cofoundry code elements such as ViewComponent we have an injected service called IVisualEditorStateService which can be used to query the visual editor state and get the PublishStatusQuery to use for 'ambient' entities (i.e not the entity being edited).

In the example below we use the service to get an object representing the visual editor state for the request and then call visualEditorState.GetAmbientEntityPublishStatusQuery() to get a value we can use to query a blog post listing. If the visual editor is in live mode then only published blog posts will be returned from the query, otherwise the latest version (including drafts) will be returned.

public class HomepageBlogPostsViewComponent : ViewComponent
{
    private readonly ICustomEntityRepository _customEntityRepository;
    private readonly IVisualEditorStateService _visualEditorStateService;

    public HomepageBlogPostsViewComponent(
        ICustomEntityRepository customEntityRepository,
        IVisualEditorStateService visualEditorStateService
        )
    {
        _customEntityRepository = customEntityRepository;
        _visualEditorStateService = visualEditorStateService;
    }

    public async Task<IViewComponentResult> InvokeAsync()
    {
        var visualEditorState = await _visualEditorStateService.GetCurrentAsync();

        var query = new SearchCustomEntityRenderSummariesQuery();
        query.CustomEntityDefinitionCode = BlogPostCustomEntityDefinition.DefinitionCode;
        query.PublishStatus = visualEditorState.GetAmbientEntityPublishStatusQuery();
        query.PageSize = 3;

        var entities = await _customEntityRepository.SearchCustomEntityRenderSummariesAsync(query);

        return View(entities);
    }
}

Note that IVisualEditorStateService is scoped to the ASP.NET request for the page and will not work from a WebApi request.