How to integrate Product Reviews in an Episerver website

In this post, I will go over how I implemented integration between my Episerver website with ProductReview.com.au

There were three things involved in the development:

1. Custom Plugin – This really is just a settings page that allows authors to add multiple endpoints/APIs from Product Reviews (i.e. you have multiple products up for reviews)
2. Scheduled job that grabs the latest reviews for all your products and stores the response internally
3. New block that allows authors to render the outcome of the product review

Two reasons why we opted for the scheduled job approach instead of server-side/AJAX call on render of page are:

• Performance – we don’t have to make an extra server-side call to Product Reviews every time a webpage on your site is rendered since the latest results are already stored internally
• SEO – Google can’t index these reviews if the reviews are loaded through an AJAX call. The reviews have to be part of the first render of the page.

[TABS_R id=2594]

Scheduled Job

[ScheduledPlugIn(DisplayName = "External Data Importer")]
public class DataImportScheduledJob : ScheduledJobBase
{
   private readonly DataImportService _dataImportService;
   private bool _stopSignaled;

   public DataImportScheduledJob(DataImportService dataImportService)
   {
      _dataImportService = dataImportService;
      IsStoppable = true;
   }

   public override void Stop() 
   { 
      _stopSignaled = true; 
   }

   public override string Execute() 
   { 
      //Call OnStatusChanged to periodically notify progress of job for manually started jobs 
      OnStatusChanged(String.Format("Starting execution of {0}", this.GetType())); 
      var endpoints = _dataImportService.GetAllImportedData(); 
      foreach (var endpoint in endpoints.Where(e => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(e.Endpoint))) 
      { 
         OnStatusChanged(String.Format("Importing data for {0}", endpoint.Source)); 
         using (var webClient = new WebClient()) 
         { 
            endpoint.Response = webClient.DownloadString(endpoint.Endpoint); 
            endpoint.ImportDate = DateTime.Now; 
            _dataImportService.UpdateDataImport(endpoint); 
         } 
         if (_stopSignaled) 
         { 
            return "Stop of job was called"; 
         } 
      } 
      return "All configured external data have been imported"; 
   } 
}

[TABS_R id=2774]

And this is what the new block looks like: