Access context data

Sitefinity ASP.NET Core Renderer provides context data through the RequestContext and IRenderContext services.

The IRequestContext interface holds information regarding:

• Current user
• Current site
• Current language
• Page layout
• Current page

To access it in the ViewComponents, you must inject it in the constructor.
For more information, see Access context information sample on Sitefinity GitHub repository.

Additionally, the current user object is synced to the httpContext.User property and the CurrentLanguage property is synced with the Thread.CurrentUICulture property.

The current user profile is exposed through a web method and the custom fields assigned to it are also available. The current user profile returns the following fields:

• Short text
• Long text
• Yes / No
• Date and Time
• Number
• Taxonomies

The main purpose of the current language property is to hold the language version of the page that is currently being rendered.

You can use it in the following cases:

• To localize content
  For more information, see Localization.
• To build a language selector.
  For more information, see the Language selector widget sample on Sitefinity GitHub repository.

The current page object is provided in the IRequestContext interface, containing all fields that are not related data fields.

You can access them by injecting the IRequestContext object through a dependancy injection and accessing the fields with the GetValue method that is part of Sitefinity REST SDK.

For more information, see REST SDK » The SdkItem class and ISdkItem interface on Sitefinity GitHub repository.

If you want to fetch and access related data items of the page object, you must make a query to Sitefinity CMS using the REST SDK.
For more information, see Default.cshtml of the Accessing context information sample on Sitefinity GitHub Repository.

You can use the current site object for contextual information, depending on the requirements of the widgets. One such example is the Language selector widget, linked above. 

For more information, see the Language selector widget sample on Sitefinity GitHub repository.

The IRenderContext interface holds two properties and one method:

• IsEdit
  Used to check whether the current request is executing in the page editor.
• IsPreview
  Used to check whether the current request is executing in the page preview.
• IsLive()
  Used to check whether the current request is executing when browsing the live site.

These properties are useful for showing contextual information in edit mode, when an actual representation of the widget cannot be rendered.
For more information, see the Conditional rendering in editor sample on Sitefinity GitHub repository.