In a previous post about extending Glass Mapper to handle custom data types I shared some code which I felt was overly verbose and I did not like the amount of code that had been copy/pasted. The example I used was a fairly trivial one, but it’s always good practice to try avoid copy/paste in case some point in the future the base implementation is changed. It might not always be clear to future developers how that piece of code had come about.

In that original post, Mike Reynolds (a.k.a sitecorejunkie) suggested use of the Decorator Pattern to wrap an instance of the base mapper and delegate some of the methods. Well it got me feeling uneasy and I finally found a little time to come back and clean that code up, I went a slightly different route and decided to use constructor overloading.

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On a recent project I needed to add a couple of fields to Media Items templates in order store some additional data. We are using the Glass Mapper ORM in our project and out of the box there are two fields which we can map to: Image and File. I also needed to retrieve the file size, which neither of these fields returned either.

It turned out to be relatively simple to extend Glass Mapper and add our own custom data handler to map the additional fields.

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