Introducing Content Inspector

The Content Inspector is an open source addon for Episerver which helps you get a better overview and improved navigation of complex content structures, such as nested blocks.

Once installed, it will add a new menu item to the content area dropdown menu, which lets you "inspect" the selected content, showing property values. This includes content areas, which means that nested content (blocks in blocks) can be viewed and navigatd with ease. This is demonstrated in the GIF below with a "carousel block" which contains sub blocks.

Image inspector.gif

Name, type, publish status and content area property values are displayed by default in the content inspector view. To display additional properties, use the Inspectable attribute on properties:

[Display(Name = "Carousel image")]
[Inspectable]
public virtual ContentReference CarouselImage { get; set; }

[Inspectable]
public virtual string ImageDescription { get; set; }

[Inspectable]
public virtual string Heading { get; set; }

This can be particularly useful for blocks that contains images:

Image inspect_with_props.png

There is also an option to inspect the entire current content, and not just a single content area item.

Image inspect_current_content.png

By clicking Inspect current content, every content area item will be listed, as well as any properties marked as inspectable.

Image inspect_personalized_and_forms.png

Any kind of IContent can be listed, whether it is pages, blocks, forms, media or commerce content. As shown in the image above, visitor groups are also displayed.

I originally made the addon for Varner Retail, who came up with the idea. When I asked if I could share it as open source, the answer I got was "The Episerver community has given us so much. I don't see why we shouldn't give something back". Thanks, Varner!

Introducing Content Inspector

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