OrchardCMS: How to access Content Menu Item boolean field in cshtml view - orchardcms

Question

In orchard, I've added a boolean field called "IsDone" to the built in Content Menu Item content part via that Admin interface. I've then picked an item in Navigation and set the option to "yes" for the corresponding field i added.
In my custom theme, I've copied over MenuItem.cshtml.
How would I get the value of my custom "IsDone" field here?
I've tried something like
dynamic item = Model.ContentItem;
var myValue = item.MenuItem.IsDone.Value;
but I'm pretty sure my syntax is incorrect (because i get null binding errors at runtime).
thanks in advance!

Answer 1

First i suggest you use the shape alternate MenuItemLink-ContentMenuItem.cshtml instead of MenuItem.cshtml to target the content menu item directly.
Secondly, the field is attached to the ContentPart of the menu item. The following code retrieves the boolean field from this content part:
#using Orchard.ContentManagement;
#using System.Linq;
#{
Orchard.ContentManagement.ContentItem lContentItem = Model.Content.ContentItem;
var lBooleanField = lContentItem
.Parts
.Where(p => p.PartDefinition.Name == "ContentMenuItem") // *1
.SelectMany(p => p.Fields.Where(f => f.Name == "IsDone"))
.FirstOrDefault() as Orchard.Fields.Fields.BooleanField;
if (lBooleanField != null)
{
bool? v = lBooleanField.Value;
if (v.HasValue)
{
if (v.Value)
{
#("done")
}
else
{
#("not done")
}
}
else
{
#("not done")
}
}
}
*1
Sadly you cannot simply write lContentItem.As<Orchard.ContentManagement.ContentPart>() here as the first part in the part list is derived from this type, thus you would receive the wrong part.

Answer 2

While #ViRuSTriNiTy's answer is probably correct, it doesn't take advantage of the power of the dynamic objects that Orchard provides.
This is working for me but is a much shorter version:
#Model.Text
#{
bool? IsDone = Model.Content.ContentMenuItem.IsDone.Value;
var IsItDoneThough = (IsDone.HasValue ? IsDone.Value : false);
}
<p>Is it done? #IsItDoneThough</p>
You can see that in the first line I pull in the IsDone field using the dynamic nature of the Model.
For some reason (I'm sure there is a good one somewhere) the BooleanField uses a bool? as its backing value. This means that if you create the new menu item and just leave the checkbox blank it will be null when you query it. After you have saved it as checked it will be true and then if you go back and uncheck it then it will have the value false.
The second line that I've provided IsItDoneThough checks if it has a value yet. If it does then it uses that, otherwise it assumes it to be false.
Shape Alternate
#ViRuSTriNiTy's other advice, to change it to use the MenuItemLink-ContentMenuItem.cshtml instead of MenuItem.cshtml is also important.
The field doesn't exist on other menu items so it will crash if you try to access it. Just rename the .cshtml file to fix this.
Dynamic Model
Just to wrap this up with a little bit of insight as to how I got there (I'm still learning this as well) the way I figured it out is as follows:
.Content is a way of casting the current content item to dynamic, so you can use the dynamic advantages with the rest of line;
When you add the field in the admin panel it looks like it should be right there on the ContentItem, however it actually creates an invisible ContentPart to contain them and calls it whatever the ContentItem's type is.
So if you had added this field to a Page content type you would have used Model.Content.Page.IsDone.Value. If you had made a new content type called banana it would be Model.Content.Banana.IsDone.Value, etc.
Once you are inside the "invisible" part which holds the fields you can finally get at IsDone. This won't give you the actual value yet though. Each Field has its own properties which you can look up in the source code. the IsDone is actually a BooleanField and it exposes its data via the Value property.
Try doing a solution-wide search for : ContentField to see the classes for each of the fields you have available.
Hopefully this will have explained things clearly but I have actually written about using fields in a blog post and as part of my getting started with modules course over on the official docs (its way down in part 3 if you're curious).
Using built-in features instead of IsDone
This seems like a strange approach to do it this way. If you have a Content Item like a Page then you can just use the "Show on a menu" setting on the page.
Go to admin > content > open the page > down near the bottom you will find "Show on a menu":
This will automatically put it into your navigation and then you can move it around to where you want:
After it "IsDone" you can just go back and untick the "Show on a menu" option.
Setting up the alternative .cshtml
To clarify your comments about how to use the alternative, you need to
Copy the file you have at Orchard.Core/Shapes/Views/MenuItem.cshtml over to your theme's view folder so its /Views/MenuItem.cshtml
Rename the copy in your theme to MenuItem-ContentMenuItem.cshtml
Delete probably everything in it and paste in my sample at the start of this post. You don't want most of the original MenuItem.cshtml code in there as it is doing some special tricks to change itself into a different shape which isn't what you want.
Reset your original Orchard.Core/Shapes/Views/MenuItem.cshtml back to the factory default, grab it from the official Orchard repository
Understanding the view names
From your comments you asked about creating more specific views (known as alternates). You can use something call the Shape Tracer to view these. The name of them follows a certain pattern which makes them more and more specific.
You can learn about the alternates on the official docs site:
Accessing and Rendering Shapes
Alternates
To figure out what shape is being used and what alternates are available you can use the shape tracing module which is documented here:
Getting Started with Shape Tracing