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[This post is part of the developer's manual preview published on this blog. You can find temporary TOC here.]
ControlPanel is the root view of every module and it provides the basic user interface for the modules. Module class (class that derives from WebModule) is in charge of instantiating a new instance of ControlPanel when user navigates to a given module and from that point on, ControlPanel is the one that takes charge.
Before we go deeper in the topic, let’s examine a typical Sitefinity Control Panel.
So, as the picture shows, typical Control Panel consists of Control Panel body in the middle (1), Command Panels on the left (2) and Breadcrumb (3) at the top, above Control Panel body. One could easily conclude that this is the way Sitefinity modules look like and that’s it.
However, if you examine the WebModule base class, which will instantiate the Control Panel class, you will notice that all it expects from this function is a Control.
SAMPLE 1: WebModule’s call for an instance of Control Panel
public override Control CreateControlPanel(TemplateControl parent) |
{ |
return new GenericControlPanel(); |
} |
Having this in mind, we can easily conclude that Sitefinity will work fine with any kind of Control being returned as Control Panel, thus making something like this a possibility.
So, now that we have established that we are completely free to implement from scratch our own Control Panel, we will see why this may not be such a good idea and how can we save dozens of hours of our time by deriving from standard ControlPanel class (Telerik.Cms.Web.UI.Backend.ControlPanel).
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