What’s new in C1 CMS 6.9?

• Better support for running C1 from the command line.
• A new rendering pipeline
• Donut caching

A new rendering pipeline

There’s a new option in Composite.config that allows rendering pages without using ASP.NET Web Forms internally.

<configuration>
  <Composite.Core.Configuration.Plugins.GlobalSettingsProviderConfiguration ..>
    <GlobalSettingsProviderPlugins>
      <add ... omitAspNetWebFormsSupport="false" />

When set to “true”, rendering UserControl functions and Masterpage templates is no longer supported, but in exchange, there’s a performance gain and it enables us to build some rendering related features on top of it, namely “donut caching”.

“Donut caching”

On a page with dynamic/user specific content, where ASP.NET full-page caching is usually not applicable, now it is possible to mark certain functions as “excluded from the cache”. By doing so, you will have all the other parts of the content cached server side.

To use the feature:

1. Add or set the attribute value omitAspNetWebFormsSupport=”true” in /App_Data/Composite/Composite.config
2. Override PreventFunctionOutputCaching on a Razor function with dynamic content:

@inherits RazorFunction

@functions {
    public override string FunctionDescription { get  { return "Shows a timestamp"; } }
    public override bool PreventFunctionOutputCaching { get { return true; } }
}

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" style="color:red; font-size:34px">
    Timestamp: @DateTime.Now.ToString("s")
</div>

3. Enable the full page caching in web.config

Minor changes and bug fixes

• Fixed: the console search is not working when SqlDataProvider is used #720
• Fixed: the page selector widget is not showing a previously selected value when being opened.
• Updated: the list of self-closing HTML elements #694