Umbraco foreach children of a child page

Question

I have news posts within a news page within a homepage on my content structure

Example:

Homepage
- News
-- News Posts

I'm looking to have some of the news feed on my homepage in a foreach statement. In my head it should be as simple as:

@foreach (var homenews in CurrentPage.Children.Children)
{
     if (homenews.Name == "News Post")
     {
         //Do some stuff//
     }
}

Obviously that doesn't work so has anybody got any ideas? Thanks

Solution 1

I ended up getting the news page by its id and then getting it's children from there. The below code worked for me. Thanks guys.

@{
    var node = Umbraco.Content(1094);    
    <p>@node.Id</p> // output is 1094  
    foreach (var item in node.Children.Where("Visible").Take(3))

    {

         <p>@item.exampleText</p>

    }
    }

Solution 2

When you're walking the tree you have to remember that a property (or method) like Children or Descendants() will return a collection of objects, so you can't just call Children of a collection. You can only call Children on a single object.

You can find the correct child of the homepage by using something like var newsPage = CurrentPage.Children.Where(x => x.DocumentTypeAlias == "NewsListingPage") and then extract the children of that page.

Solution 3

You need to reference the required node by NodeTypeAlias of it's Document Type.

So assuming the alias of the DocType of your News Posts is “NewsPosts” then...

@foreach (var homenews in @Model.Descendants().Where("NodeTypeAlias == \"NewsPosts\"")).Take(3)
{       
    <p>@homenews.Name<p>
}   

...should return the name of the first 3 news posts.

Comments

[Phil]

The logic of this makes perfect sense but I am struggling get my code to work. @{ var newsPage = CurrentPage.Children.Where(x => x.DocumentTypeAlias == "News"); foreach (var homepost in newsPage.Children) { }}

[Digbyswift]

Is it outputting anything at all? The code looks ok. You probably need to step through it with the debugger.

[Digbyswift]

I also tend to add in null checks on the node collections .WhereNotNull() or .Where(x => x != null). Also make sure that you have all the relevant references in your view. You could also try the .Children() method extension instead of the property call.

[Digbyswift]

This won't work because you are assuming that the News page is a child of the root which it isn't. It's a child of the homepage (which is a child of the root). It's bad practice to have your top level nodes as immediate children of the root.

[Phil]

I get a server error: Cannot use a lambda expression as an argument to a dynamically dispatched operation without first casting it to a delegate or expression tree type

[Digbyswift]

IMO it's bad practice to reference by ID. What happens if the page is replaced? It's much better to walk the tree and find the page by doc type alias.

[Phil]

The page I accessed by ID will never need to be changed for my project. So the above code is just what I want.

[Digbyswift]

Absolutely fine, as I said only an opinion. Pages being replaced is not the only reason it's a bad idea though. E.g. Someone picking up the code will have no idea what page 1094 is. Where as 'walking the tree' will give the developer a clear relationship between the code and the target node. Also, as a developer, never say never :)

[csharpforevermore]

Just remember that this approach is not considered good practice. Putting logic in your view is always considered a bad option. Instead, do the logic in a surface controller and assign the results to a view model / poco property,

[Kunal]

I got Model.Content.Children.Where(x => x.DocumentTypeAlias == "NewsListingPage").Where("Visible") working

[Digbyswift]

@Kunal Yes, that would work if you only had access to the RenderModel passed to the view. The CurrentPage member is a property of the RenderMvcController (and SurfaceController) class so is only accessible in the controller.