Amazing! Thanks Kevin! That's really helpful.

At step 3 - is there a way to add the package to an existing Umbraco setup rather than creating a new Umbraco instance?

Hi Owain,

yes - if you add the package as a reference to the existing project then that will copy the dll. in when it builds.

you can then either add the targets file to the projects .csproj file (i think this is what the template does) e.g

<Import Project="..\my.super.package\build\my.super.package.targets" />

<ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\my.super.package\my.super.package.csproj" />
</ItemGroup>

but personally for app_plugins what i do (and its a little bit more setup, but faster working). is i have a gulp script that copies files from the packages appplugins folder to the sites appplugins folder

(for example backofficethemes package has this gulpfile.js, and a paths.json file that tells it to copy files from a to b.)

this just means when you are working with the html/js files you can just save them in the project and they are copied over, and you don't have to restart / rebuild the your site or package to see those changes

Perfect! That works. The csproj update approach. I'll look at the gulp option in future too though as it sounds really good.

Final question - for now 😉

How would you recommend setting up API keys from a user? So the user will need to get the API keys from the API and then save them in to the content app, somehow.

O.

Put them in appsettings.json

While you could have all sorts of cool, DB , or other settings if you put them in the appsettings.json file, you hook into all the power of that in netcore, people can store them in key vaults, environmental variables etc..

for this you need a model class which contains your AppId and AppKey

public class MyPackageSettings {
       .... settings here
}

hen in a composer you load the options.

var options = builder.Services.AddOptions<MyPackageSettings>()               
                    .Bind(builder.Config.GetSection("MyPackage"));

and then in your service/controller you can inject them into the constructor

public myService(IOptions<MyPackageSettings> settings) {
    // read the model here
}

then in appsettings.json you would have

"MyPackage": {
     "AppId": "",
     "AppKey": ""
} 

Thanks again Kevin!

O.

Thanks again Kevin. So copy/paste is the way forward rather than trying to get the package to do it somehow.

O.

Yeah,

I think that's the best way, if you want the settings to be portable with the site (if you don't mind them not being your can stuff them in the DB).

but just to be clear it is possible to write back to appsettings.json (isn't everything possible?)

its just not a recommended thing because settings can be formed from so many locations, and the way dotnet core projects are built and then published means things could/will get overwritten when a site is redeployed.

Hi Alex, It looks like the ConditionalDisplayer package isn't installing first and so your package can't installed due to this dependency.

I've not created a package that has another package as a dependency yet, but maybe someone else can help you with that.

I'll reach out to others and see if anyone else can join this conversation and help.

O.

Hi Owain,

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate it.

What's interesting is that I do have the required files in the App_Plugins directory on both the package project and the project that consumes the package, and I also have the ConditionalDisplayers.dll in my bin directory.

I also used the NuGet package explorer and can see the ConditionalDisplayers folder with the App_Plugins directory as part of the NuGet package.

I also found that when I manually modify the package.xml file and change the property types to say text string I can bypass this error, so I am not sure if this could be anything to do with the XML migration which may not be recognizing that property type as valid.

Thanks again.

Alex

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for your response.

I do have PackageReference to the ConditionalDisplayers package in the project I am packaging up as well as the site that uses the package. But unfortunately, I still get the same issue when installing the content using the XML migration method.

Thanks