Custom Property Types

A property is defined by its name and data type and the page type it is connected to. EPiServer CMS has a number of built-in data types for properties and a whole infrastructure in place to make it easy for editors to work with the properties and their values as they create and maintain web pages.

There are two types of page property in EPiServer CMS:

• Built-in properties are always present and are supplied by the EPiServer CMS runtime system. Examples of built-in properties are PageName (name of the web page) and PageStartPublish (start publish date for the page). Read more about built-in properties in the EPiServer CMS Online SDK.
• Custom properties are handled in Admin mode by developers and administrators and can be divided into two types: static properties and dynamic properties.

Static properties are created, named and given a data type and other settings in Admin mode. The only thing left for editors to do in Edit mode is to provide a value for the property.

Dynamic properties are used to store a property on one or more pages simultaneously. The different dynamic properties that are available vary and are set up under Dynamic Properties in Admin mode. Dynamic properties are always stored on the page that you have selected and all its sub-pages. If you have other values stored on one of the sub-pages, you can choose to retain them or overwrite the values. Dynamic properties are added in the same was as other properties although from the Dynamic Properties menu option on the Page Type tab in Admin mode.

It is always possible to create new types by inheriting from the existing ones. There are 10 property data types available in EPiServer CMS. (The names of property data types are slightly different in Admin mode; keep this in mind when you add properties in Admin mode.)