Item Publisher

The Item Publisher app is an app which is used to publish items to frontend – typically in a list or a grid format, but it's up to you.

To use this app you attach it to a paragraph in the usual manner and then:

• Select an item type and a source for the items you want to publish
• Select or create a template which controls how the items are rendered in frontend
• Set up filters if appropriate 
• Enable or disable frontend-editing of items

Please note that the item publisher app comes with some perfomance overhead when the source contains many items. If you experience slow rendering speeds please consider using the query publisher to publish items instead.

Using the app settings (Figure 2.1) you control which items and item fields you want to publish.

Figure 2.1 The Item Publisher data settings

Here you can:

• Select the item type you want to publish
• Select the area you want to publish items from. Your options are:
  • Select items from this language/area – publish items from a specific website
  • Select items from current language/area – publish items from the website with the app attached
  • Select items under the current page – publish all items under current page (the page with the app attached)
  • Select items under the following pages – publish items from one or more pages.
  • Select specific item(s) – publish specific items from the item repository.
  • Named item list – publish items from a named item list
• Include paragraph items – also publish the paragraph items belonging to the pages you publish
• Include child items – publish all items (children, grandchildren, and so on) under the selected page/website.
• Include inherited items – publish all items inherited from a base item type. Available from 8.6.1.0
• Show login for restricted items – list restricted pages, but require login for accessing the details
• Item fields – lists: Specify which item fields you want to show in the list view when publishing items
• Item fields – details: Specify which item fields you want to show in the details view when publishing items

The list settings (Figure 3.1) control how you render lists of items.

Figure 3.1 The Item Publisher list settings

Here you can:

• Select the template you want to use for the list view
• Specify a sort order
• Select you list view type
  • Normal provides you with ordinary paging. Write the number of items you want on a page in the Page Size field.
  • Partial provides you with the option of selecting a partial list of items to show – enter the item to start from in the item from and the item to end with in item to field
• Specify a page size in items

The details settings (Figure 4.1) control how you to render the details view of each list item. 

Figure 4.1 The Item Publisher details settings

With the details settings you:

• Create or select a template
• Specify the paragraph you want to display the details view on, when a user clicks view or edit on an item – the selected paragraph needs to also have the item publisher app attached, with the same item type selected.

If you're publishing page items, you don't need to use the details template at all. You can link directly to the page instead.

With the filter settings, you can set up conditions (rules) in order to limit the subset of items published.

Figure 5.1 You can filter the items before publication by creating filtering rules

To set up a rule:

• Click add new rule
• Choose a field to filter on
• Add a condition and a value to test for
  • Conditions available: is/is not, contains/does not contain, starts with/does not start with, and ends with/does not end with
  • You may choose between the operators AND and OR when combining your filtering rules.

You can use values from the context to control which items are published:

    @Request() – get value from System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Request
    @Session() – get value from System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session
    @Page() – get value from current Page object, if any. (Current page exists if a valid PageID is in the query string).
    @User() – get value from the current User object.
    @Code() – evaluate C# code
    @Paragraph() – get value from current paragraph object, if any. (Current paragraph exists if a valid ParagraphID is in the query string).
    @ProductID() – get value from current product object, if any. (Current product exists if a valid ProductID is in the query string).

Examples:

    @Page(MenuText) – Get title of page
    @User(Name) – get name of user
    @User(Email) – get email of user
    @Code(System.DateTime.Now.AddDays(1)) – get tomorrow’s date
    @Code(1+2) – get 3 (possible, but stupid, granted)

Finally, the Edit settings allow you to enable frontend editing of items, and the error messages settings allow you to customize the errors shown when users try to save empty or invalid field entries.

Figure 6.1 Enable frontend editing of item fields by using these settings

With the edit settings you can:

• Enable editing of item fields in the frontend
• Select the template you want to use for the edit page

With the error messages settings you can:

• Specify the error message on an incorrect field value used
• Specify the error message on an empty field

Read about item types and field types to learn how to make an item field required, and how to introduce validation on an item field.

The Item Publisher supports query string filtering.

System type string fields can be filtered using the following operators: 

System type numeric fields can be filtered using the following operators:

System type double fields can be filtered using the following operators:

System type date fields can be filtered using the following operators:

Other useful parameters are:

Finally, you can also override (or set) most of the app settings from the query string:

• ItemType
• IncludeParagraphItems
• IncludeAllChildItems
• IncludeInheritedItems
• sourceArea
• sourcePage
• SourceItemEntry
• SourceItemEntries
• sourceType
• ListTemplate
• DetailsTemplate

The Item publisher extension tags - Item.Render/RenderItem() & Item.RenderList/RenderItemList() - are methods to render an item directly in a template without the use of a page or paragraph.

For example:

The following parameters are available to you when using the tags: