N2 CMS: Are nested collections of ContentItems possible?

Question

Can an arbitrary number of ContentItems of the same class to be added to a page in N2? And can they be nested?

I.e. Is there a way to define a collection of ContentItems as a property in N2? I’d also like to nest these if possible so we can run more meaningful queries against the data. (I.e. instead of using huge EditableTextRegions which will be difficult to query.)

I currently have the following model as an ‘ideal’, can this be N2ified? (I’ve left off attributes and N2 style getters/setters for clarity)

public class Link : ContentItem
{
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public string Url { get; set; }
}

public class Panel : ContentItem
{
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public List<Link> Links { get; set; } // Should show an expandable number of “Link” editors in the CMS editor
    public string ImageUrl { get; set; }
}

public class Page : ContentItem
{
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public string BodyText { get; set; }
    public List<Panel> Panels { get; set; } // Should show an expandable number of “Panel” editors in the CMS editor
}

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

4

Yes - instead of Get/SetDetail in your properties use Get/SetDetailCollection.

FYI if you're using 2.1 you can just make your properties virtual and leave off the Get/SetDetail - not sure if this works for the DetailCollection methods though, but you can mix the two.

I'd be careful with what you're proposing though - nesting collections like this is likely to cause you SELECT N+1 issues down the line. If you can't change the design then I'd recommend turning on N2's database caching (which is just NHibernate's 2nd level cache), this way as much as possible will be kept in memory without hitting the database too much.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

Community

1
1

answered Jan 12 '11 at 08:56

spmason

4,048
2
24
19

Thanks for the answer, I've got it working now in a different way by looping through the children collection, and casting the members to the the appropriate type. Also we're stuck on version 2.0 for the time being :( I'll post some code soon to illustrate... – Sam Salisbury Jan 16 '11 at 23:47

N2 CMS: Are nested collections of ContentItems possible?

1 Answers1