We recently spotted an article from Bill Roger’s blog (Ektron’s CEO) which discusses usage of the Ektron Server Controls v.s. Ektron’s API. At Activo, we are constantly using both approaches and indeed each approach is a bit different and is used in different situations. The article makes it much clearer that Ektron actually put more effort than we thought before into the Server Controls. Understanding that the Server Controls were made for this sort of usage makes us now feel more secure using this method. Previously, I always thought of this method as a hack and preferred the API.

Frank heads our .NET development team and added the following:

I’ve found it easier to start off with a foundation of one of the server controls and build off of that, rather than using only API calls. The server control acts as a “datareader” which can be used to access the data initially. Many of the custom controls we built to replace XSLT use this model:

• Add a ListSummary inside the user control/page and set its properties.
• Access the ListSummary’s EkItems property.
• Manipulate the data from EkItems, transform it, and output it into a repeater.

This tends to work more reliably than using the API calls. However, if the code needs to bypass the permissions model, the only option is to go direct using the API.

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