I am attempting to create a WebPart in Kentico 11 that supports handling an n-length list of items. I found that creating a WebPart with property fields is pretty straightforward in Kentico, but I am having trouble finding documentation on how to best set up a WebPart that can lookup & output multiple model objects.
I've tried the following approach, but it has some drawbacks that I'm not entirely comfortable with:
Set up a Container page type to place instances of data objects inside. I restricted it to ensure that only my custom Page Type data object is available as a child of it.
Place a Pages DataSource in the template zone and direct it to the Container page.
Hook up a Repeater element to it and apply a transformation & content before+after to the Repeater.
While this works, it feels a little cludgey. Content editors have to be wise enough to know how to set up DataSources & Repeaters, plus how to bind them together and apply transforms, and additionally remember to fill in the content before and content after fields with the appropriate wrapping HTML markup.
This is not something that I expect a content editor should need to remember.
Is there a cleaner way to put lists of items inside of a template zone without needing to drag & configure a datasource and container page?
I did not see any way to set up a Page Type field in such a way that it would essentially model a one-to-many relationship with another Page Type. Did I miss something there? If I could do that, then I could write a transformation to handle the wrapping HTML markup, and the looping of children. Haven't been able to find a way to make this work though.
The best way to accomplish what you are asking is with a custom form control. In your case, the form control should be able to let users select multiple items.
You can actually use 'Sortable multiple object selector' marketplace item for this purpose. This form control will enable you to select multiple items based on a certain type (that you need to configure in code) and editors would simply use the select dialog to choose the items.
Related
In my application, i would like to replace a viewpanel with a repeat control.
However, part of the functionality is there is a UI aspect that allows users to select certain fields (that correspond to the view), and only display the documents that match. The view is doing a filter that allows users to select aspects of the view to create a search (the code is under search of the view) that allows the view panel to be updated with the results of the search.
one of the things that is curious is that the viewpanel has a value of "#{javascript:view2}" vice an actual view name.
The viewpanel defines the search view and the ...
I'd like to be able to apply that same functionality to the repeat control. I don't see those attributes on the repeat control... Any pointers? Its been a while since i've worked with xpages... long enough that I've forgotten a lot already....
TIA !
Read this blog post I did a while back, it should explain what you need.
The view panel doesn't filter anything, it just displays rows from a datasource, same as a repeat control. Indeed you can add components to a ViewPanel's column, pulling from the current row by adding a var property to the dominoView datasource.
The view is bound to #{javascript:view2} (which would be better done by binding to #{view2} - there's no need to call SSJS here). view2 is a dominoView datasource somewhere on your page. The datasource is a wrapper that has properties to capture the settings for filtering and searching that you want to do. At runtime, they are calculated and changes the ViewEntries in the datasource.
Finally there's is the underlying Domino View object available also to LotusScript. This holds and will always hold all entries. The dominoView datasource queries that using the filtering and searching properties and retrieves a ViewEntryCollection or a ViewNavigator.
So whether you use a View Panel, Repeat Control, Data View or whatever else, those are just components to visually represent a collection of ViewEntries or Documents. All can be bound to a dominoView datasource. Where repeat controls and Data Views give you extra power is you can bind them to any kind of collection, not just a dominoView datasource (e.g. DocumentCollection, ViewEntryCollection, multi-value field, Java collection, etc).
I often find that doing the searches in Java and then passing the results to the repeat as a List work better and allow more options. I can get all the information I need in Java and load that into a Map or Tree. This gives me the ability to do custom sorting in the Java class and also to combine data from other views/databases easily. Since the data is now in memory it gets reloaded fast. The only thing you have to watch for is the size of the data. If you have a view with many entries (10K?) you might not want to load everything into memory...
Howard
I'm not sure if you've found a solution yet, but consider using jQuery dataTables. Oliver Busse wrote a very detailed blog post about integrating dataTables into XPages.
To get the specific formatting, I used a repeat control to include the "td", "tr" and "thead" attributes Oliver listed in his blog post.
Is it possible to associate a view with different documents (not simultaneously of course)?
What I want to achieve: the application can have multiple documents of the same type, that can be added during runtime, and set of suitable views, the main of which is CFormview-based. The user can choose the number of the document to show per combobox in the toolbar. The views then associate themselves with this document and update with data from it.
Is it possible to achieve with CMultiDocTemplate?
If yes, how? especially is it possible to retrieve a document by it order number?
If not I'll probably have to abstain from using the templates altogether, which of course means more coding (and more questions to friendly community), but it will do what I want it to do and not Microsoft thought I should be doing
Yes, you could but not out of the 'box'. Instead I'd recommend a different strategy. Rather than trying to attach a View to an existing CDocument derived class LOAD the Views CDocument with the information you want. That could done by adding a simple Copy method to the CDocument or you could move your actual data into a separate class then just point the CDocument to 'data' you want.
Trying to change the CDocument instance for a CView is going against the MFC grain which normally means lot of ASSERTS.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle a requirement I have for an Orchard module I'm building.
I have a ContentPart that has a few fields. One field is a ContentPicker that allows for multiple items to be associated to the part. The rest are descriptive information.
The issue I have is that I actually need to be able to include more than one of this ContentPart into a ContentType. I need to create a ContentType that has exactly 3 of this part.
Should I be making this into a field instead of a part? Is it even possible to have a ContentField that has other fields in it?
Or, should I somehow use all the same models and data structures, but somehow define it as 3 distinct parts?
Just wondering what the best practice to do something like this would be.
You can only have one part of each kind on a given type. You can't have fields that have other fields in it (instead - take an existing field and extend it with custom stuff).
As I understand, the actual problem is "how to make groups of fields with some metadata for each group", right? If so, there are a few approaches to solve the problem:
Create a custom field based on Content Picker (basically - take existing Content Picker and extend it with your metadata) and use this without the need for a separate part
Create one part to hold only the metadata for each field attached to it and attach 1 or more fields to it
Create 3 distinct parts. Parts should be thought of as extensions that add some unique features to an item. If you think it's logically ok to have 3 parts then go for it.
I have defined my own projection by a query which returns a set of content items of known content type. I would like to take pick up certain content parts of these content items and display them in the list. Using shape tracing tool I have found the view template where to write my custom layout:
/Views/Parts.ProjectionPart.cshtml
but from the Model variable in the template I can not get the data I want because it is way too high above from the content parts data.
a good example of what I want: let's say I want to render product catalog as defined in this tutorial:
http://skywalkersoftwaredevelopment.net/blog/writing-an-orchard-webshop-module-from-scratch-part-5
but I want only to render a list which consists from items:
name of the owner who created the product
name of the product.
publish date of the product
and I need to render it at one place, i.e., not separately in their own part views.
Have you tried adding a layout in the projector module? There is a properties mode option that lets you select which fields/data to show. If the data you want is not there, you should be able to implement an IPropertyProvider. There are examples of this in the Projections module code.
I'm trying to make a custom property for a WebPart. The custom property should be a drop down with choices coming from a "choice" column from a content type. Is that even possible?
You have two options:
1) If your choices will never change then you can hardcode an enum with these values and use that as datatype for your custom property. SP will the automatically generate a drop down.
2) If you can't hardcode the values then you have to implement what is called an EditorPart where you can code the UI for handling entry of the custom property
You cannot data bind directly to a content type column as it does not exist as in a bindable form, only as an XML secification on the content type itself.
Better to specify the column as a lookup and databind to the list directly. However, that is not going to work well when you only want one lookup across multiple webs or site collections.
In that case create a list in a config site such as http://intranet/sites/config and code a lookup control to databind to that list. Then use the control in the webpart and in a custom field control on the content type.
A bit of work, but worth it if you require SharePoint edit control (versioning, security etc) access to the contents of the lookup and a single (changeable) source of data across the entire site.