Data List - Preview of Umbraco Content data source with $ parameter

[bjarnef]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When using Umbraco Content as data source is seems it doesn't show preview of the data like a custom data source.

Would it be possible to show a preview of this? It would be okay to limit the results if there are many nodes, but nice to visualize the Xpath query works 😁

[leekelleher]

@bjarnef It will show a preview, but depends on the XPath expression used. If it's contextual, e.g. starts with one of the $ parameters, then DataType has no context of that - as it's not in the Content tree.

For explicit/absolute XPath expressions, it will show the preview.

[bjarnef]

@leekelleher the XPath used is $site//brandArchive which has some Brand Page child nodes.

Some months ago a made this PR umbraco/Umbraco-CMS#10049 to Umbraco as I noticed using XPath in MNTP didn't worked well in media and member section because it didn't know about the current site/root node, but if only a single root node exists it could be enhanced a bit 😎

I guess it could do some extra check on if only a single content root node exists - otherwise it is okay just to leave empty preview.

[leekelleher]

My code is piggy-backing on Umbraco's UmbracoXPathPathSyntaxParser.ParseXPathQuery method. So for the $site parameter, it there still needs to be a contextual Content node ID in order to traverse the tree.

Alternatively, if you do only have a single root node (e.g. level 1), then you could amend the XPath to use $root/*[@level=1]? or because you're doing a descendants selector, go straight with $root//brandArchive? (though I prefer explicit naming, e.g. $root/descendant::brandArchive[@isDoc]). That should give you a preview of the data-list items.

[bjarnef]

Okay thanks for the explanation @leekelleher
It works fine with $site variable in the XPath, so just more curios if there was a way to hack it in case only a single root node is available in content section 😁

So not that important and if there is no easy way to make that work, it is just the way it is! 😅

[leekelleher]

Yeah, I did look at various ways to make the preview work with contextual XPaths, but it became one of those things were I'd be adding more code to fulfil an edge-case, so I parked it.

I'll close off this ticket and add it to the Known Issues on the README. 👍