Sitecore Multisite Manager and 'source' field in template builder - sitecore

Question

Is there any way to parametise the Datasource for the 'source' field in the Template Builder?
We have a multisite setup. As part of this it would save a lot of time and irritation if we could point our Droptrees and Treelists point at the appropriate locations rather than common parents.
For instance:
Content
--Site1
--Data
--Site2
--Data
Instead of having to point our site at the root Content folder I want to point it at the individual data folders, so I want to do something like:
DataSource=/sitecore/content/$sitename/Data
I can't find any articles on this. Is it something that's possible?

Answer 1

Not by default, but you can use this technique to code your datasources:
http://newguid.net/sitecore/2013/coded-field-datasources-in-sitecore/

Answer 2

You could possibly use relative paths if it fits with the rest of your site structure. It could be as simple as:
./Data
But if the fields are on random items all over the tree, that might not be helpul.
Otherwise try looking at:
How to use sitecore query in datasource location? (dynamic datasouce)

Answer 3

You might want to look at using a Querable Datasource Location and plugging into the getRenderingDatasource pipeline.
It's really going to depend on your use cases. The thing I like about this solution is there is no need to create a whole bunch of controls which effectively do he same thing as the default Sitecore ones, and you don't have to individually code up each datasource you require - just set the query you need to get the data. You can also just set the datasource query in the __standard values for the templates.
This is very similar to Holger's suggestion, I just think this code is neater :)

Answer 4

Since Sitecore 7 requires VS 2012 and our company isn't going to upgrade any time soon I was forced to find a Sitecore 6 solution to this.
Drawing on this article and this one I came up with this solution.
public class SCWTreeList : TreeList
{
protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
{
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Source))
this.Source = SourceQuery.Resolve(SContext.ContentDatabase.Items[ItemID], Source);
base.OnLoad(e);
}
}
This creates a custom TreeList control and passes it's Source field through to a class to handle it. All that class needs to do is resolve anything you have in the Source field into a sitecore query path which can then be reassigned to the source field. This will then go on to be handled by Sitecore's own query engine.
So for our multi-site solution it enabled paths such as this:
{A588F1CE-3BB7-46FA-AFF1-3918E8925E09}/$sitename
To resolve to paths such as this:
/sitecore/medialibrary/Product Images/Site2
Our controls will then only show items for the correct site.
This is the method that handles resolving the GUIDs and tokens:
public static string Resolve(Item item, string query)
{
// Resolve tokens
if (query.Contains("$"))
{
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(query, "\\$[a-z]+");
foreach (Match match in matches)
query = query.Replace(match.Value, ResolveToken(item, match.Value));
}
// Resolve GUIDs.
MatchCollection guidMatches = Regex.Matches(query, "^{[a-zA-Z0-9-]+}");
foreach (Match match in guidMatches)
{
Guid guid = Guid.Parse(match.Value);
Item queryItem = SContext.ContentDatabase.GetItem(new ID(guid));
if (item != null)
query = query.Replace(match.Value, queryItem.Paths.FullPath);
}
return query;
}
Token handling below, as you can see it requires that any item using the $siteref token is inside an Site Folder item that we created. That allows us to use a field which contains the name that all of our multi-site content folders must follow - Site Reference. As long at that naming convention is obeyed it allows us to reference folders within the media library or any other shared content within Sitecore.
static string ResolveToken(Item root, string token)
{
switch (token)
{
case "$siteref":
string sRef = string.Empty;
Item siteFolder = root.Axes.GetAncestors().First(x => x.TemplateID.Guid == TemplateKeys.CMS.SiteFolder);
if (siteFolder != null)
sRef = siteFolder.Fields["Site Reference"].Value;
return sRef;
}
throw new Exception("Token '" + token + "' is not recognised. Please disable wishful thinking and try again.");
}
So far this works for TreeLists, DropTrees and DropLists. It would be nice to get it working with DropLinks but this method does not seem to work.
This feels like scratching the surface, I'm sure there's a lot more you could do with this approach.