I have a number of non-page content items that are used as "callouts" on the side of pages throughout my website that I am building in Sitecore. Ideally I would like to be able to define the presentation information for these callouts independently. Then when a CMS author selects callouts for a particular page in the site, they know how to display themselves. I read an excellent blog post about how to do this here: http://www.awareweb.com/AwareBlog/InversionControl2.aspx. I used the first method that he describes in the post.
However my implementation of that code doesn't completely work. It seems to get the correct rendering and it iterates properly through the selected non-page callout items. But when it displays them on the page it seems like the callout items are still using Sitecore.Context.Item as their source item and not the source item that was passed in to them via the strDataSource variable as seen in the example code.
Do I have to do anything special in the code behind for the sublayouts for the callouts to tell them not to use Sitecore.Context.Item and instead to use the source item that was passed in? Otherwise I can't figure out why it's not working. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Corey
Setting the DataSource in a sublayout doesn't explicitly set the Context.Item to a different value, it just sets a property in a sublayout that it can use itself.
Rather than write up the solution again, John West's blog already covers this subject here, so I'd recommend you read that - http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2010/11/How-to-Apply-Data-Sources-to-Sitecore-ASPNET-Presentation-Components.aspx
I would recommend using the SublayoutParameterHelper Shared Source library which provides a Helper and a base class to use with your sublayouts for accessing the Item represented by an ID set in the DataSource; John also cites this library in his blog post.
Related
I want to build a website, maybe similar to a movie database, where every page has, say, actors, director, year (it seems that Lektor can deal very well with such structured metadata), and I am thinking about how to realize internal links between pages on that site.
Say I have a text such as
just like in [his previous movie](link), he shows again ...
then I guess I could use the absolute path of the linked page as link target, but that makes me very inflexible with respect to changing URL structure. Can I somehow just use the ID of the target content?
Or, better yet, can I somehow automatically obtain the title of the linked page?
just like in his previous movie <<link:title>>, he shows again ...
Can I use the standard Markdown blocks for that or would I have to add some handcrafted database lookup logic?
if some contents will be changed in future. I think you can use the databag feature to implement it. you just modify the databg in case changed is need.
I'm trying to learn how Microdata works and I was looking at the Schema.org website and I kinda get how the basics works because you can find some outlined examples online of the Navigations, Headers, Sidebars and Footers - but I don't understand what properties you can use with more complex item types.
Let's say I have an About page on my site.
Nothing fancy, you just talk about your business but there is a item type http://schema.org/AboutPage you can use.
So I visit that link but to be honest everything you see at that page isn't really written down for beginners I think.
Am I allowed to use all the item properties listed on that specific page or only the the selected few in the Thing section at the bottom of the page because the above two sections are part of WebPage and CreativeWork? I don't have the CreativeWork item type on my page, just the WebPage attached to my HTML body tag.
I always thought you could use those item types as snippets in your HTML to wrap pieces of HTML content together and you didn't need to work with an inherited workflow. Going from wrapped content inside WebPage → CreativeWork → AboutPage item types.
How to find the items types and which properties you can use within them?
First note, you can’t use the vocabulary Schema.org with Microformats. You probably confused it with Microdata, which is one of three syntaxes the Schema.org partners support (the other two are JSON-LD and RDFa). (I edited your question accordingly.)
You may use all properties that are listed on a type’s page.
A type in Schema.org always inherits from all its parent types, up to Thing. So, for example, the type AboutPage is also a WebPage, which is also a CreativeWork, which is also a Thing. You just have to use the most specific type that applies in your case.
For finding appropriate types, simply start at Thing and check the "More specific Types", linked on that page. And repeat.
Another way would be to search for some related keywords on the list of all types and check if a suitable type exists.
The problem is if you're unfamiliar with XML and Schemas because schema.org is as friendly as they can be without actually giving more examples of it, simply because stuff like this is indeed complex to make generic enough to reuse, while verbose enough to explain.
However there are some Google tools which can help you learn:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/
And register for Google Webmaster Tools account, and use their data highlighter and test.
Use that in combination with the schema.org examples and definitions, and then you'll properly relatively fast start learning which tags to use and how to nest them.
I'm trying to create subpanel in Account detail view where list of elements is fetched from external REST service.
I know how to define subpanel, but have no idea how to fill it with data from external network source. Was trying to use get_subpanel_data but there I can only change SQL.
Any ideas how can I do this?
When I've done this in the the past, at least with Sugar 6, I opted distinctly not to try to create a true subpanel. The data being loaded is coming from an outside source and is loaded dynamically with the page, so why present it as if it's static data coming from Sugar? Instead, I created a custom Smarty template to use as the footer on the detail page. For such an example, you can check how it works on the Calls Edit View. I think it's the footerTpl parameter in the detailviewdefs.php or editviewdefs.php. I loaded the smarty template by creating a custom detail view for my module, so custom/modules/MyModule/views/view.detail.php - extend the base Detail View class and override the display to feed Smarty new params, then your Smarty template only needs to iterate through and present the data that your view defined.
To be super-hip and abide by MVC, you could even put your custom code into your bean (if it's a custom module) or into a custom controller method, then reference that from the view.detail.php, and still feed it from there to the Smarty template.
Alternatively, you could just load JavaScript into the Smarty template and use the JavaScript to call the third-party service, parse and present it, etc.
I realize this question is a little bit old now however it comes up fairly often so why not provide an answer with a couple possible solutions. I won't get into code but more just into the design theory of how it can work. If someone needs more specific code help then that is another question.
A couple ideas...
As you mentioned you can define a custom Function which will load in Data to the SubPanel from your own SQL Query. That is one method that I just recently got to finally put to use after knowing about it for a good year and a half.
When you go this route, you are restrained to using the Columns in the SubPanel. I assume it is using the actual Metadata files to determine which Field Columns a SubPanel can use so you pretty much need your custom data in a Database table to have the same column names as the fields defined in the SubPanel Metadata.
Obviously this works great in the right situation, however not always and that leads us into the 2nd method I know of.
The other way is pretty much what #Mattew-Poer mentioned in his answer. It means abandoning the SubPanel altogether and instead generating your own HTML. This is by far my favorite and prefered way of doing it and I have been some really custom modules due to this being possible in a custom module! I will show an example below.
(Click HERE to View full size image)
In the screenshot, you can see in this example that I have something looking Similar to a SubPanel however it is not and is much for flexible and easy to customize.
Example, to the far left column in my fake subpanel is image checkboxes. When clicked on, an AJAX request is made to change the Task row Status.
After that, the checkbox image is updated to indicate the new Status state, the Modified DateTime is updated, the Status column has color background SPANS and is also updated with the correct text and background color when the left side checkbox is clicked.
Doing any of this with the standard SubPanels is a complete nightmare and would be difficult to do some of the stuff that you are open to do when you build your own version of a SubPanel.
With that said, I have built an identical clone of the above screenshot using SugarCRM default SubPanels! It was a nightmare. I could easily update the content and HTML in some of the columns. I even had the AJAX click checkbox image to update and do all the other updates I mentioned above. It wasn't too hard and worked fairly good but it had some issues.
When you do inline edit, inline create record, or subpanel paging to load different set of record. You would then lose all the custom HTML formatting that was applied. The reason is, in the SubPanel you are limited to using the After UI load logic hook. So since the "Page" is loaded already, when an AJAX request is made to add/edit the subpanel content or load a new set of items with the paging links. It only loads the SubPanel content on those events and the whole Page content does not reload. Because the logic hook only fires off 1 time after the page loads, this newly loaded subpanel data doe not receive any of your custom HTML formatting.
In my case, this means that nice looking colored background Status spans are lost, the image checkboxes are lost, and some other functionality is lost.
Now to get super technical, I could have gone another 3rd route and instead made new Custom Field Types for each SubPanel filed that I needed to apply custom HTML to. This process is super hard in my experience and in some cases it really isn't the BEST solution.
Because of the reason explained, this is why my new modules use the Custom HTML route to generate my own version of a custom subpanel or whatever Data is needed in my Module pages! So far it is working better than I imagined and has opened doors for me to build custom SugarCRM modules that I previously didn't even realize would be possible to build due to some of the issues I mentioned above. Now I bypass them altogether and open the door to do pretty much anything!
I've got some really cool stuff for SugarCRM in the works right now. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask in a new question or for me personally in a comment here.
I'm having a little bit of a hard time getting into mvvm. I'm writing a simple app, Notebook. I have one viewmodel, it's name is actually ViewModel. It has an ObservableCollection of Notes inside and methods to save and load those from Isolated Storage. My only Model is Note.cs, it implements INotifyPropertyChanged and I'm of course RaisingPropertyChanged.
I've also got two view, both of them are user controls. One to display list of notes and one to edit the one chosen from the list.
My questions are:
Where do I create an instance of my vievmodel?
How should I implement going from the page with list of notes to the page with detailed view after choosing one Note to edit? At the
moment I'm saving the index of Note in App.xaml.cs, going to the next page and setting
the DetailedView DataContext to the right Note in OnNavigatedTo, but
I don't think it's actually the perfect solution.
Where should I save my Notes? I guess Application_Closing in App.xaml.cs is the right place to do it, but I'd have to have my viewmodel as a global object there, is this the right approach?
Additional question:
I have to add possibility to group notes. I guess that class Group with dictionary (GroupName, howManyNotes) is going to be allright since I don't have to be able to for example write all notes from selected group. Do you think there's a better approach I should think about?
Thanks for respones,
Michał.
I would suggest you take a look at Calibrun.Micro which is a great framework for MVVM. You can get some sample from the CodePlex.
I have used that in a bunch of Project, and will give you flexibility in case if your project grows in size.
Google for Caliburn.Micro sample and you will find a number of sample for all technologies like WPF, Silverlight, Windows Store, Windows Mobile.
Caliburn.Micro CodePlex
I am just wondering is there any plugin to create dynamic content for a page i.e something similar to a data repeaters in .net. To make it simple it should be a section that should contains 5 to 6 fields/property like
heading
heading 2
image
content - rich text editor
info
This must be in repeatable control so that the editor can add any number of these section a page and all these should be displayed in a single page.
Is there a plugin for the above functionality or what is the best way to achieve this.Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Aneesh
You can achieve this without any plugins.
Create your repeatable section (containing the relevant fields) as a document type, and then use the multi-node picker in another document type to select one or many of the sections.
So for example, I could have a FAQs page (which uses a document type called "FAQs Page"), and I want to be able to add multiple question and answers to this page. I could set up a document type called "Question". This will contain two fields: Question and Answer.
On the "FAQs Page" document type, I would add a multi-node picker field called "Questions". This way, an author could select multiple "Question" nodes to appear on the FAQs page.
You would obviously need the code to output this, and also you would create a data type that inherited from multi-node picker, so that you could limit the selection to only Question nodes.
There is also the Repeatable Custom Content datatype which works well but does not support all data types. But it does support all the ones you need for your stated purpose (textstring, media picker, richtext area, etc).
You can find it here: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/repeatable-custom-content I've used it a few times and it works really well in certain situations (e.g. where the items will not be shared across different pages of your site).
If you are sharing content components across multiple pages then #Digbyswift's solution is perfect.
I've always Digbyswifts method, but whilst looking for an alternate solution tonight I found this plugin, which is excellent for those situations where creating lots of widget nodes feels like overkill. It's licensed but the free older version is also available.
http://inaboxdesign.dk/blog/widget-builder-for-umbraco/