Navigate to Edit mode instead of Dashboard in EPiServer CMS 6

There is a question on the forum regarding how to change the default mode when navigating to the protected path in EPiServer CMS 6. Customer wants to get into Edit mode instead of Dashboard when navigating to <yourSiteUrl>/<yourProtectedUrl>. I think that answer to this question worth a small post here.

Routing to the Dashboard is controlled by a special module called EPiServer.Shell.Web.Routing.ShellRoutingModule. It can be replaced with your own implementation. Here is how it can look like if you want your users to be redirected to Edit mode instead of Dashboard:

public class CustomRoutingModule : UrlRoutingModule
   {
       private static object _orignalPathKey = new object();

       /// <summary>
       /// Matches the HTTP request to a route, retrieves the handler for that route, and sets the handler as the HTTP handler for the current request.
       /// </summary>
       /// <param name="context">Encapsulates all HTTP-specific information about an individual HTTP request.</param>
       public override void PostResolveRequestCache(HttpContextBase context)
       {
           string protectedPath = EPiServer.Shell.Paths.ProtectedRootPath;
           string requestedPath = context.Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath;
           if (string.Equals(protectedPath.TrimEnd('/'), requestedPath.TrimEnd('/'), StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
           {
               context.Items[_orignalPathKey] = requestedPath;
               context.RewritePath(protectedPath + "cms/edit/default.aspx");
           }

           base.PostResolveRequestCache(context);
       }

       /// <summary>
       /// Assigns the HTTP handler for the current request to the context.
       /// </summary>
       /// <param name="context">Encapsulates all HTTP-specific information about an individual HTTP request.</param>
       public override void PostMapRequestHandler(HttpContextBase context)
       {
           base.PostMapRequestHandler(context);

           string requestedPath = context.Items[_orignalPathKey] as string;
           if (requestedPath != null)
           {
               context.RewritePath(requestedPath);
           }
       }
   }

You also need to replace ShellRoutingModule with a CustomRoutingModule in the web.config in configuration/system.webServer/modules:

<!-- add name="ShellRoutingModule" type="EPiServer.Shell.Web.Routing.ShellRoutingModule, EPiServer.Shell" /-->
   <add name="CustomRoutingModule" type="MyRoutingModule.CustomRoutingModule, MyRoutingModule" />

After that, your users will be able to navigate to Edit mode with the same URL that before was used for Dashboard. However, the Start menu and Dashboard context menu will navigate to Edit mode as well, thus making Dashboard unavailable from menus. To fix this, you need to remove default routes for the Shell module defined in C:\Program Files (x86)\EPiServer\Framework\6.2.267.1\ Application\UI\module.config:

...
<route>
  <!--defaults>
    <add key="moduleArea" value="Shell" />
    <add key="controller" value="Dashboard" />
    <add key="action" value="Index" />
    <add key="id" value="" />
  </defaults-->
</route>
...

The last changes will affect all EPiServer sites on the server, so you might consider creating a copy of the whole folder containing module.config and pointing physicalPath attribute of the EPiServerShell virtual path provider to the new folder.

Nov 08, 2012

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