Implementing a Sitecore Data Provider

When you implement a data provider you are creating two things:

  1. Implementation - a .NET class that implements the data provider
  2. Configuration - specifies where Sitecore should use the implementation

Implementation

A data provider inherits from the abstract class Sitecore.Data.DataProviders.DataProvider.

  • API - describes the API used to build a custom data provider
  • Mapping identifiers - approaches for mapping unique identifiers from external systems to Sitecore item IDs
  • Search - how to ensure items from custom data providers are available to the Sitecore search API
  • Publishing - how to ensure publishing items from custom data providers works as required
  • Templates - how to work with templates
  • Non-hierarchical data - how to work with templates

Configuration

Configuration is used to tell Sitecore which data providers a Sitecore database should use.

Adding a data provider to a Sitecore database

The following example demonstrates how to define a data provider and add the data provider to the master Sitecore database:

<dataProviders>
  <myDataProvider type="Testing.DataProviders.MyDataProvider, Testing" />
</dataProviders>

<databases>
  <database id="master">
    <dataProviders hint="list:AddDataProvider">
      <dataProvider patch:before="*[1]" ref="dataProviders/myDataProvider" />
    </dataProviders>
  </database>
</databases>

Data provider order

Data providers are handled in the order they appear in the configuration. For more information on configuration and how order is determined, see the section on the Patch Files.

It is important to understand that a data provider is assigned to a Sitecore database, not a Sitecore item. This means that when multiple data providers are assigned to a Sitecore database, all data providers will run for all items in that database.

This is useful because it allows multiple data providers to work together to populate items.

However, this can cause problems if you are not expecting this to happen. If you want to ensure that no subsequent data providers are run after your data provider runs you must use the Abort() method on the CallContext object that is passed to your data provider. For more information on the CallContext type, see the data provider API page.