I am trying to create a Sitecore site with a main Layout called _Main. The _Main layout has one Placeholder called Content.
I want to allow the author to insert components (Renderings, I guess) into this Placeholder. The components he will be allowed to insert will have names like...
Two_Column_Right
Two_Column_Left
One_Column
These are basically "scaffolding" components which, in turn, will have their own internal placeholders (e.g. RightRail, LeftRail, Center). The author will then be able to insert “real” components into these placeholders.
The goal is to allow the user to dynamically build the layout of the page.
My question is this: Will this work. Has anyone done it before? Will I need to use dynamic placeholders? Will this be possible using the Experience Editor?
Thanks!
This is a very common pattern of 'containers' which should definitely leverage dynamic placeholders. Otherwise, you will get into issues if you have two one-columns on a page and need to have a user add it to the correct one-column container.
So, so to your questions:
Yes it will work.
You should use dynamic placeholders or you will be severely limiting yourself and causing editors issues.
This can be done in Experience Editor, it is just a normal rendering after all.
Related
Our Application has components which consume components with consume components of varying complexity. So i just want the input on the page, to validate when an object is set that the text is correct. The issue is that it is one of these subcomponents.
My colleague told me that there is 2 ways to do this, The first is to use Page Objects, and Chaining annotation to find it on my page, and then find the next id etc until my input is found. It requires me to look through another teams' Component Markup to narrow it down to the input i want to leverage. I dont believe I should have to go into another component definition, or a definition of a definition to get the appropriate chain to get this arbitrary input. It starts to create issues where if a lateral team creates changes unbeknownst to me, my PO will be broken.
The other option my friend asked was to use fixture.query to find the component. This would be as simple as:
fixture.query((el)=> el.attribute["id"] == "description",
(comp){
expect(comp.value, value);
});`
Using Query looks at the markup but then will automatically componentize it as the appropriate SubComponent. In this case, comp.value is the value stored in the HTML. So, if i did something like:
fixture.update((MainComponent comp) {
comp.myinput.value = new Foo();
});
Then I am setting and getting this programmatically, so i am a bit unsure if it properly would reflect what is on the screen.
Whats the best course of action? It seems PO would be better, but im not sure if there is a way around having to deep query for input boxes outside of the component i am testing.
Thanks
I don't think I have a definitive answer for you but I can tell you how we do it at Google. For pretty much any component we provide the page object alongside the component. This is twofold it is for testing that widget, and also so we can have this as a shareable resource for other tests.
For leaf widgets the page objects are a little less fleshed out and are really just there for the local test. For components that are shared heavily the page object is a bit more flushed out for reusability. Without this much of the API for the widget (html, css, etc) we would need to consider public and changes to them would be very hard (person responsible for making the public breaking change needs to fix all associated code.) With it we can have a contract to only support the page object API and html structure changes are not considered breaking changes. At times we have even gone so far as to have two page objects for a widget. One for the local test, and one to share. Sometimes the API you want to expose for a local test is much more than you want people to use themselves.
We can then compose these page objects into higher level page objects that represent the widget. Good page objects support a higher level of abstraction for that widget. For example a calendar widget would let you go to the next/previous month, get the current selected date, etc. rather than directly exposing the buttons/inputs that accomplish those actions.
We plan to expose these page objects for angular_components eventually, but we are currently working on how to expose these. Our internal package structure is different than what we have externally. We have many packages per individual widget (page_objects, examples, widget itself) and we need to reconcile this externally before we expose them.
Here is an example:
import 'package:pageloader/objects.dart';
import 'material_button_po.dart';
/// Webdriver page object for `material-yes-no-buttons` component.
#EnsureTag('material-yes-no-buttons')
class MaterialYesNoButtonsPO {
#ByClass('btn-yes')
#optional
MaterialButtonPO yesButton;
#ByClass('btn-no')
#optional
MaterialButtonPO noButton;
}
I am creating a Sitecore MVC site for a client and I need to create page that will list news articles for the company.
So far, I have created items that use a shared data template called “Article,” and I also have a sublayout (a view rendering) called “Article” that will display these items.
For the list itself, my plan was to create another component (a sublayout) call “News_List”, and to put a placeholder in it called “List”.
My question is this: can I allow the author to insert articles (e.g., N items of type “Article”) into this placeholder via the page editor?
Will SC allow you to insert multiple instances of the same component into a placeholder? Will this break anything?
I believe this is a pretty common question but I have not found a definitive answer. Thanks in advance…!
You can insert as many components (of the same type) in your placeholder as you want.. Just make sure to put the placeholder settings correctly and give it a decent name (not just "list" ;))
But are you sure you want to do this? Your editors will manually need to create a list of components for each article they want to add on the page. Doesn't sound to be very user (editor) friendly.. Maybe you should consider creating a list component that can get a list of articles as a datasource and show those. Or even select them automatically (but that might be not according to your business case)..
Yes, authors can add multiple instances of the same component into a single placeholder.
Assuming that the code of the component doesn't do any stupid things it's absolutely ok to do this.
i'm new in cakephp and I have started with version 3. I want to build a beautifull app and because I'm not good in design, I would really like to use a free template or buy one that I can use within cakephp.
So, I would really appreciate all your propositions and ideas or best practises. The easy way will be the best because I don't have a lot of time with this project. Thank you in advance.
If you don't have a lot of time like you mentioned, the easiest way to go ahead and get started is to paste a lot of the code in your default.ctp layout inside of src/Template/Layout/default.ctp.
You'll notice there are some lines of PHP already in there that are relevant to fetching blocks of css, meta tags, and other bits of code that could potentially exist throughout your project.
Find the main layout of the theme your trying to use - the one that will be consistent across most of the pages. That's the one you'll use for default.ctp. Compare what's already in default.ctp and make the comparable adjustments around the HTML in that document while keeping the important lines of PHP there as well.
For other important pages like a login or registration page, just create a new document for those, like 'login.ctp', then inside the function that loads the page (maybe 'login' inside of UsersController'), change the default layout with this line of code:
$this->viewBuilder()->layout('login'); // without the .ctp ending
This way you can create one-off layouts that don't really match any other page.
Let's say there exists a presentational component in a project that renders an unordered list (called ListRenderer, perhaps.) We have a couple options of supplying data to any given ListRenderer on a page:
Have a TreeList (or TreeListEx) field on the content item, and have ListRenderer read from it.
Supply a DataSource (or other Parameter) to the ListRenderer via the presentation details.
I usually avoid #1 in my projects because it binds Sublayouts to templates, which gets quite messy. If you go down that path, eventually you'll have fields to support every potential sublayout in your project.
So my solutions tend toward option #2, which gets rid of that problem. It does, however, come with its own bag of questions. Where do I put these various "Lists" for a given ListRenderer to use? To maximize reuse and sharing, I usually create a components directory near the site root that contains all these types of things, if I predict the Lists will be shared. This seems less findable and harder to use for the content author, who suddenly have no idea where the source for their ListRenderer is unless they know how to crack open the presentation details (which is slightly advanced for my average user).
If I feel like Lists won't be shared, and are very specific to the page, I'll put them directly underneath the item in question. This has a tendency to muddle up the content tree, though, and any dynamically generated navigation sublayout then has to check for whether or not an item is an actual page before it generates the link to it. The more I work in Sitecore, the less I use this approach, but it seems easier for the content author. There is much easier access to information when you use this approach.
Is there any industry-accepted way of approaching this problem? It happens in projects all the time, and in my head I struggle to balance technical and content authorship concerns in situations like these.
Great question. I've used all the techniques you mentioned, depending on the audience and specifics of the project. The problem is that, as with all things Sitecore, they are all valid ways of achieving the same goal and you will struggle to find one answer that will work in every situation.
I almost always use #2 as well, but some content author retraining maybe necessary and make sure you add in restrictions to what the content author is able to select as a target. I have (within the same project) structured the items near the root (in a shared content folder) and under the item in question, depending on what I felt would provide the best context.
Also, if other child pages would exist below the item as well as the list items, then I would put the list items in a separate folder (with a common "list items" icon") and re-order it to be the first item for separation and clarity.
If you want to use any kind of personalization and DMS then you will need the ability to switch out the datasource anyway so you shouldn't hard code locations.
You might also (if you have not already) want to consider using:
Convert Data Source Paths to IDs Using the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS
- Useful if you need to restructure your content at a later date
Queryable Datasource Locations
- Useful for multi-site situations when you need to make clones, or setting as the default datasource value in Standard Values when the lists are directly below the item but gives you the flexibility to change it.
I prefer using querable datasources personally, I find the xpath syntax more logical.
As Mark has commented, there is no real industry standard.
I feel like this is something that needs improvement.
Especially when you are using the DataSource option, things become less transparent to the editors and as the size of the site grows, so does the complexity.
All I can tell you is how I would do it, which is most likely much like how you are doing it.
1) For overview pages like news, events and faq items, I will put the items underneath the overview item and use the NewsMover shared source module to auto-create a hierarchy.
2) I will create a Global site that contains items that are shared across sites or pages. DataSource items for components will be put in here.
3) For components that are present on the standard values, I will add a list field to the template (for example, when you display related items on a content page)
Most often it's a logical choice and sometimes it's just a matter of taste.
I'd like to add that I've written a blog post on how to have datasource items created automatically for components that are set on standard values. That might help you if you are using those.
Edit:
"I usually avoid #1 in my projects because it binds Sublayouts to templates, which gets quite messy. If you go down that path, eventually you'll have fields to support every potential sublayout in your project."
Today I've blogged about a method of hiding fields and sections in the content editor if there is no sublayout set on the item that requires those fields, which helps to prevent the mess of having a lot of unused fields on your items.
I would like to dynamically build a form to edit a set of properties (say from a xml file or so).
On top of that, I would like to perform validation for each property (mandatory values/optional values) with a set of rules (ideally also dynamically loaded).
These rules could be associated to a single field (allowed values, range, ...) but could also link several fields (conditional validation).
I would like to be able to save the results "on the fly" (as soon as a field loses focus).
Does someone have a good lead to get me started?
Here is what I found so far:
I could start from the Qt property browser framework for the dynamic form generation. I could extend this framework to suit my needs.
Regarding the validation, I read about QValidator which seems to be a good start. However, I couldn't find anything involving several fields (cross-parameter validation)
The QSettings framework does this auto-save feature quite nicely and I guess I could reuse that.
I just wanted to be sure I am not missing some existing framework to deal with my goals since
it seems like a relatively standard thing to do.
Assuming that the fields of the form are fixed. Then you could use a shared instance of a QValidatorto validate the text in all the fields by running your validaton over a list /dictionary /map containing pointers to the fields. The list/*dictionary*/map will have to by dynamically populated and cleared, and a pointer to it hard-coded inside QValidate::validate. And if QValidator sharing is not allowed you will have to create individual ones and execute your cross-field validation.
Alternatively, you could use Qt's Signal-Slot mechanism to implement your validation whenever the text in your field is changed.
I had no idea of QSetting, and would have used the very same signal-slot mechanism to do the autosave.