Orchard Core as an Intranet

[kevinasdzine]

I'm prototyping an Intranet using Orchard Core with Blazor wasm and I was wondering if there are any other contributors using the platform this way and anything they can share?

I think the basic idea of having no content types accessible anonymously covers a bunch (i.e. just accessing the site forces a login). All users would have access to some content types in the Admin - e.g. "creating Suggestion content items" and might be able to create some other types as Draft only.

However, I'd also like the published content to be interactive through the Theme to some point (e.g. liking or voting on content). I'm assuming I would just tie additional SQL tables back to different content instances in Documents to track this sort of thing. However, before I "roll my own" I'd like to see if there is any existing examples of this.

Anyone else running their intranet on Orchard Core?

[Piedone]

With Blazor WASM there shouldn't be anything special compared to any frontend framework. As far as OC is concerned, probably the most complex part will be authenticating with the web APIs.

While we at Lombiq have worked and work on quite a few functionally intranet websites (not intranet in the network sense, but apps that are accessible solely for people within a company, despite hosted on the internet), since those are private, I'm not at a liberty of talking about them, but if you have specific questions, I'll try to answer.

[kevinasdzine]

I wasn't looking to make a pure Blazor front-end (I still like the shape templates for most content presentation) but just for places where I want enhance the client experience - e.g. forms with cascading behaviors.

I'm curious about the use of additional SQL tables in parallel with Orchard's document database (like tracking "likes" on an article). I believe a migration can still add arbitrary tables to the database. Can they be related to documents?

[Piedone]

Yes and yes. You can do this completely independent of OC too, with any ORM or plain SQL. Better is to utilize at least migrations indeed, but even if not, IDbConnectionAccessor to get the current connection instead of opening a new one.

We do this with custom tables and LINQ to DB BTW, see https://github.com/Lombiq/Helpful-Libraries/tree/dev/Lombiq.HelpfulLibraries.LinqToDb.

OC tables are just tables as usual, however, you need to take care of the relationships with documents and other tables (e.g. when the document is deleted, the row in your custom table should also be deleted). While you can attempt this with custom foreign keys, the easiest approach for custom but document-related tables is to just create YesSql index tables, because those are managed automatically.

[kevinasdzine]

examples of CreateMapIndexTableAsync I've seen have an IndexProvider that updates the fields in the index from the fields in the content item. However, I'm trying to create a one to many relationship between the content item and the user's votes (each user gets one vote). So, I'm assuming I will need a separate table with a foreign key to the content item and a foreign key to the User (unless that is wrapped up in one of these SchemaBuilder methods already and I just haven't found an example of it).

[kevinasdzine]

It's a bit difficult to follow the code but would AuditTrail be a good model for this sort of data?

[mariojsnunes]

I've been doing that for a few years, but with Angular.
We don't allow any user access the Orchard backoffice, instead we provide a custom UX to create/manage the Content.
This is our website if you want to peek: https://diggspace.com/