Roman Hutnyk Bits Orchestra

There are many nice articles about web site performance optimization accross the Internet. As long as this is really important topic, I think there can't be too many of them. That's why I'd like to share some suggestions on how to make Kentico run faster.

Recently I've shared an idea of how you could provide live site users with edit interface for custom module data. As you might know, perfection has no boundaries... This time I want to share some improvement, those will allow you to reuse the same web part for literally any object within your application.

Kentico provides us with REST service which is extremely handy when building Single Page Application or native mobile app as it allows us to retrieve any kind of data we need and goes even further than that - allows to manipulate that data creating new or editing existing objects or pages, applying workflow actions to a page, etc. However there are cases, where REST almost covers our needs. In this post I'm going to introduce an approach that might help you to hit your target.

Despite the fact that Kentico provides nice interface for managing data inside of the custom modules, sometimes there is a need to provide user to do so on the live site. There are appropriate web parts for editing pages, working with online forms or custom tables, but I couldn't find any control that provides similar functionality for custom module class. In this post I want to share with you solution I found.

In this post I'd like to walk you through a process of building parent-child relation with the forms. Those, who know Kentico and available range of features could ask absolutely obvious question: why would I build parent-child relation with forms while there are modules, or, at least, custom tables? I can see two good reasons for doing this:

parent object is already created and there is cost related with conversion it to a module class
it allows non-technical users, such as content editors, creation of the parent-child data structure

Recently I attended Kentico South group micro summit. During one of the presentation interesting discussion has appeared: which one is it better to use - Custom Table or Module class. There were different opinions as well as arguments for or against each of those approaches.

After Kentico introduced custom Modules in version 8, I liked this feature and use it a lot. However Kentico did not removed Custom Tables and, I believe, there was some good reason behind this. So I decided to investigate that reason and give you "apple to apple" comparison.