Plugging in components into a view

When you create a component definition, you can automatically plug the component definition into a view by defining plug-in paths to one or several containers. A plug-in path is a unique string that describes the plug-in area. Episerver provides helper classes with string constants to plug-in to an area without having to type the plug-in area as a string. For example, you can add the following code to your component:

private readonly string[] _plugInPaths = new string[] { EPiServer.Web.PlugInAreas.DefaultAssetsGroup };

public override string[] PlugInPaths
{
    get { return _plugInPaths; }
}

Plugging in component hierarchies

You can plug entire component hierarchies in by adding children to the top-level component that you create in the CreateComponent method. The following example shows how to plug in a new tab to the dashboard with two components:

public override IComponent CreateComponent()
{
    var root = new ComponentContainer() { PlugInPath = "/samples/dashboard/mycustomtab" };
    root.Settings["numberOfColumns"] = 2;
    root.Settings["title"] = "My custom tab";

    var fileManager = new FileManagementComponent().CreateComponent();
    fileManager.Settings["column"] = 0;
    root.Add(fileManager);

    var pageTree = new PageTreeComponent().CreateComponent();
    pageTree.Settings["column"] = 1;
    root.Add(pageTree);

    return root;
}