I’ve been building up my jot notes throughout the year and finally got the chance to make them into publishable form, which lead me to this sudden series of articles. Thanks, John, for letting me post on your site.

To achieve maximum compression on a JavaScript file, minification is not enough.  Obfuscation is where it’s at.  This means replacing variable names to the shortest amount of characters (or bytes) that the language syntax allows.  For example: var myReallyLongVariableName=”foobar” would become var a=”foobar”; but only within its scope, and so on.  You basically have to implement a decent chunk of code that usually comes as part of any language interpreter or compiler.  It’s quite a bit more involved than minification alone.  My point is, use a proven package that does this and just hook it up to the best CMS known to man.

My preferred way is actually to not store JavaScript or CSS in Tridion.  Put it with the rest of your website’s code into the repository like TFS or Subversion.  Basically, bundle it into your build process which should go through Change Management with the likes of JAR/DLL files and DB packages.  JS is code after all.  This way you can just add a step to your build process.  Ask the build master to crunch the JS/CSS through a compressor (possibly as a manual step) before or automate within an ANT, NANT or MSBuild script.  If, however, you are a content author or Support person that hates dealing with your org’s Change Management process or have some other reason to store js and/or CSS code as easily publishable as content, then this is for you.

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Quite a while back (in ’09′ I think) I replied to a thread on the sdltridionworld forum regaring how to get the total count of your elements when doing a TemplateBeginRepeat inside a DWT.

For example when you have a special css class that needs to be applied to the last item in the list.

<ul>
<li><a href="/contact/">Contact Us</a></li>
<li><a href="/sitemap/">Site Map</a></li>
<li class="last"><a href="/terms-of-use/"></a></li>
</ul>

An intuitive approach is to have a function or a variable that provides the count so that you can use syntax like this:

<ul>
 <!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="Component.LinkList" -->
<li><a href="@@MyUrlField@@">@@MyUrlText@@</a></li>

  <!-- TemplateBeginIf cond="TemplateRepeatIndex == TemplateRepeatCount()-1 -->
<li class="last"><a href="@@MyUrlField@@">@@MyUrlText@@</a></li>

  <!-- TemplateEndIf -->
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->
</ul>

I’ll post that function later once I dig up the code again.  Though, here is another approach which I used one late night in the office wanting to finish a template.  It was past my sys admin’s office time, so I couldn’t ask him to deploy a new Custom Functions DLL to the CM server’s GAC/bin, but I just had to get the template done by end of day – I was in the zone.  Besides, I couldn’t let it linger the next day.  

So here is a quick C# fragment that should be used in sequence after Will Price’s “Get Linked Components” extension (just Google it if you don’t know.  It’s the best thing since the combustion engine/sliced bread/eh…SDL Tridion CMS).

Anyway, just drop this C# Fragment in after “Get Linked Components”:

<%@ Import Namespace="Tridion.ContentManager.ContentManagement.Fields"%>
<%@ Import Namespace="System.Collections.Generic"%>

/// This TBB loops through all the items in the package and for any items which are Component Arrays
/// adds a new package item with the array entry count.  This is useful when a Dreamweaver TBB needs to know
/// the total count of components or when needing to know if you're on the last component.

List<KeyValuePair<string, Item>> extractedComponentLists = new List<KeyValuePair<string, Item>>();
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Item> kvp in package.GetEntries())
{
    if (kvp.Value.ContentType == ContentType.ComponentArray)
    {
        //get count
        extractedComponentLists.Add(kvp);
    }
}

// This code has to be kept in a separate loop since you can't modify the package.GetEntries collection while looping through it.
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Item> kvp in extractedComponentLists)
{
    IComponentPresentationList linkCollectionCPList = ComponentPresentationList.FromXml(kvp.Value.GetAsString());
    int componentCount = linkCollectionCPList.Count;
    package.PushItem(kvp.Key + "Count", package.CreateStringItem(ContentType.Number, componentCount.ToString()));
}

After this TBB runs, you’ll get a new entry on the package with the count for each “Tridion/Component[]” item type that “Get Linked Components” fetches.  So if we had a multi-value component link field in the component called “LinkList”, then “Get Linked Components” should fetch a component array and call it after your field name – something like “LinkList”.  Then after this DWT a new entry will appear called “LinkListCount”.

Use it like this in your DWT:

<ul>
<!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="Component.LinkList" -->
<li><a href="@@MyUrlField@@">@@MyUrlText@@</a>
<li><!-- TemplateBeginIf cond="TemplateRepeatIndex == LinkListCount-1 --> 
<li><a href="@@MyUrlField@@">@@MyUrlText@@</a>
<li><!-- TemplateEndIf -->
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->
</ul>