Overview

Introduction

The Glass Interface Factory is a re-imagining of the (Custom) Item Interface Factory.

It is built to work with Glass Mapper items, and is intended to be used with auto-generated glass templates (ie. with TDS).

In essence, it provides services that can be thought of as codifying both the Adapter and (more loosely) Dynamic/Multi-Dispatch patterns into a single easy to use framework.

What this means in practice is that you can now easily encapsulate business logic that should apply to specific Sitecore templates within common interfaces. With those defined, you can then create implementations of those interfaces for a given Sitecore template. This defines the adapter pattern part.

Note

The interfaces and implementations of those interfaces referred to above, are called the Glass Factory Interface and Glass Factory Type respectively.

The real magic occurs when you consider the Sitecore template hierarchy. Using a form of dynamic dispatch, we can create faux object-inheritance hierarchies between implementations of these interfaces.

Because each Glass Factory Type is an adapter for a particular Sitecore template, when a particular function is not implemented for a particular Glass Factory Type, we can search the base template hierarchy for that particular template to see if there exists another Glass Factory Type that both implements the specified Glass Factory Interface, and acts an adapter for a base Sitecore template of the original template.

This allows us to write code once and apply common behavior to base Sitecore templates, while letting us also override said behavior as needed on more derived Sitecore templates.

You can find more information on how this works in the Implementation Guide section.

Implementations

There are two primary implementations of the Glass Interface Factory to allow for use both with, and without Autofac.

In both cases, a factory builder is provided for ease of setup:

• Without Autofac: DefaultGlassFactoryBuilder
• With Autofac: AutofacGlassFactoryBuilder

Note

If you followed the quickstart guide, then you don’t need to use any builders directly. Instead, the builder.RegisterGlassFactory() extension will automatically register the IGlassInterfaceFactory service for you, and will handle construction of the factory.

The next section will cover setting up the factory.