Shared Blocks and Folders

Note: This topic has no later version.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Shared Blocks
• Folders
• Shared Blocks structure

Introduction

This section contains conceptual information about Shared Blocks and how they are organized using Folders.

Shared Blocks

A block is a .NET type inheriting EPiServer.Core.BlockData. A block instance can either be part of a page instance (in case a PageType or BlockType contains a property of the block type) or it can be a shared instance. A block that is part of a page instance is stored/versioned/loaded etc. as part of the page. A shared block on the other hand is stored/versioned/loaded individually as an own entity. A shared block can be referenced from several pages or blocks. Refer to Blocks Block Types and Block Templates for a more detailed description of blocks.

Folders

A Folder is an instance of EPiServer.Core.ContentFolder and is used to structure content. A content folder does not have any WebForm or MVC controller associated and hence it does not have any visual apperance on the site.

Shared Blocks structure

Shared blocks are structured with use of folders. A folder in the shared blocks structure can have other folders or Shared Blocks as children. A Shared Block can not have any children. The editorial access is set on the folders to specify which folders that should be available for the editor. There is a global folder root given by EPiServer.Core.ContentReference.GlobalBlockFolder that is the root folder for Shared Blocks that should be available for all sites in an enterprise scenario. There is also a site specific folder EPiServer.Core.ContentReference.SiteBlockFolder that contains the folder structure for shared blocks that are site specific. In a single site scenario typically the GlobalBlockFolder and SiteBlockFolder points to the same folder.

See Also

• Blocks Block Types and Block Templates provides a description of blocks, block types and block templates.