15 December 2010

Relational data in Sitecore - Intro

Content and data in Sitecore are structured as a hierarchy. This gives a lot of advantages, but sometimes you got some relational data, that you fit into a Sitecore structure. This has some disadvantages. First of all the relational data might not be user friendly and intuitively structured, when saved in a Sitecore database. Secondly some operations that you need to perform on the data might be extremely slow, when structured as a hierarchy.

A good example of this, is something I have done on almost every solution: News and news lists. This can be structured as a hierarchy in the backend, but often requires operations on the frontend, that only performs, when the data is in a table. Something that is very normal is a front page spot, which lists the X number of latest news of a special type. This would normally require you to iterate over all items in your content structure, which doesn’t perform unless your site consist of very few nodes.

In a couple of posts on this blog, I will try and show some different solutions to the problem.

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