On Topic

While this paper has been presented at TMRA and Extreme we thought it would be good to publish it here as well.

This paper is important as it points at the next level of topic map based productivity tools and utilities. For the topic map market to grow the tool and product creators need to enable developers and information architects to more rapidly build and deploy Topic Maps based applications.

This paper describes a C# framework for mapping TMDM data into domain specific classes. In somes ways it can be considered as a serialisation technology. However, TMObjects goes beyond that to provide update capabilites through the domain specific objects.

We are currently looking into how to improve the performance of the tmobjects read capability and also how the C# binding classes can be generated from NPCL (Networked Planet Constraint Language) structures. All this will lead to development environments that have all the flexibility and power of topic maps but with the comfort and support found with Visual Studio and a domain object model.

The full paper can be found here : Download file

Installation and Configuration

We have only tested this against the EPiServer CMS RC3 release. We suspect and hope it will work with subsequent RCs and we'll keep this blog up to date regarding compatability as new releases come out.

The existing documentation for installation and usage remains the same, therefore following the installation instructions provided is the correct procedure with the following addition. There is one new configuration property called:

<add key="NP_TM_NPCL_Endpoint" value="http://localhost/npcl-ws/NPCLSchemaService.asmx" />

This does have a default value (shown above) but in case your NPCL web service is somewhere else this is the additional line to add to the appsettings section in web.config.

Known Issues

If the Topic Map tab contents cannot render within the window and a scrollbar is required in Internet Explorer 7, then scrolling results in some weird behaviour in regards to the CSS. You can see updates on this issue on the EPiServer Developer Forum.

Migration from TMCore EPiServer Module 2.x

We haven't done a rigorous test of this, but none of the topic map data structures have been changed and as we have used our own GUID property on EPiServer pages in the 2.0 module pulling across the EPiServer data and the topic map we do not expect any compatibility issues of this type.