Is it possible to create a modularized reusable component in Umbraco 9? - components

Question

I'm looking to create a reusable, modularized component in Umbraco 9. I've never worked with any Umbraco before. The example I'll use is a text widget/component that has an image on the left and text on the right, with the ability to set whether you want to swap this to be image right, text left.
I come from the Sitecore world where creating a component like this would mean creating a definition with the fields in the back office, creating an MVC controller and an action, and pointing that back office definition at the controller/action combo. Then, anywhere I've deemed a component hot spot, I can click an "add component" and it'd display the available components I've created (Text + Image Block, in our example).
Our team has been researching how to do something like this in Umbraco. We've been using element types. I've got it working where I can create a list of element types, but we couldn't figure out how to add a controller/action/view to this process to really control what gets displayed.
We've looked into the Grid Type Editor. That requires some Angular work that wasn't exactly playing nice, for some reason it was seeing our image fields as null even though they had an image.
We also tried messing with the Block List editor, and are currently investigating macros.
We've been spinning our wheels and I'm hoping to get some assistance on how to do something like this in Umbraco. Perhaps I'm searching/using the wrong terminology?
Most of our components are super simple, and rather than create a reusable component, we can just use the grid editor. In our example above, we could create a 50/50 grid row and put an image in the left column and the text in the right. This would work, but we'd like to have a little more of a reusable package. Furthermore, a few of the components will require some controller functionality to be able to hit an API and massage some data before passing it to the presentation layer.
We will keep investigating, but ultimately I'm hoping someone can clear up if we're going down the wrong path, or just missing some crucial point here.

Answer 1

Sure! Two ways come to mind for me. One would be make a simple doctype like the screenshot below and let layout decide how to stack them
This sample uses bootstrap which of course you don't have to use, and in my case I have them in a nested content element so I basically just loop through them and alternate putting flex-row-reverse on the row.
#{
var i = 0
foreach(var contentBlock in Model.ContentBlocks)
{
<div class="d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center #(i %2 != 0 ? "flex-row-reverse" : null)">
<div class="block-left col-sm-7">
<h5>#contentBlock.SectionHeading</h5>
#Html.Raw(contentBlock.SectionDescription.ToString())
</div>
#if(contentBlock.HasValue("sectionImage") && contentBlock.SectionImage != null)
{
<div class="block1-right col-sm-5 ml-auto">
<figure class="hover">
<img id="#contentBlock.SectionImage.Name.Trim().Replace(" ", "-")" src="#contentBlock.SectionImage.Url">
</figure>
</div>
}
</div>
i++;
}
}
The other way (as you asked for) is to give the content editor the choice with a toggle, add a toggle to the doctype
and instead of this line
<div class="d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center #(i %2 != 0 ? "flex-row-reverse" : null)">
you could use this line
<div class="d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center #(contentBlock.SectionAlignment == true ? "flex-row-reverse":null)">
Or even something like this where you just assign your own class and write the CSS separately
<div class="d-flex flex-wrap align-items-center #(contentBlock.SectionAlignment == true ? "block-right":"block-left")">
Hope that helps get you going in the right direction. I'm sure you'll have to adapt this for your situation and this code is not tested.
Happy to help if you have any issues.