Adding a custom property dependent on another in Umbraco

Question

The request

I want to add Members to their department in our Company, but our company has more offices and each office its own departments, so we need to organize that first and then try to assign each Member to its department so that they only have permissions to access their own department.

Departments overview as Umbraco Content:

Root Node
-Office 1
-- Department1.1
-- Department1.2
-Office 2
-- Department 2.1
-Office 3
-- Department 3.1
-- Department 3.2
-- Department 3.3

Now, if I add a User, I want one property to select the office and another to select the department.

Possible solutions

Checking here and there, I've seen I can make the Office property using the UltimatePicker type in Umbraco creating a custom data-type linked to a parent node and then a property inside my MemberType. That will display the offices under "Root Node" and link the member to one of them.

Now, to make the department property I've seen there could be some way using a custom manually-coded property, adding a usercontrol and using it to display the office children dynamically (I've not tried it yet, I'm theorizing).

But I am worried that the second property will be dependent on the first one, and when I've tried to create my custom property implementing umbraco.editorControls.userControlGrapper.IUsercontrolDataEditor in my usercontrol it only allows me to save one value, not two of them. Which has sense as this is supposed to be A property, and not a bunch of them.

My question

Now, what's the best way to have those 2 custom properties and also make sure that in case I change the office the department will be also refreshed?

Best crazy idea at the moment

Up to this moment, I can only imagine creating 2 usercontrols, one for each property, and manually clean the department each time the office is updated, though I don't know if this is possible (Can I really get departments dynamically? Can I clean the dep. property FROM office property usercontrol?) and I would prefer to have them together as to simplify the codes.

Digbyswift Digbyswift · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-24T11:25:06

If the relationship is key and you need to prevent a user from accidentally choosing a department that doesn't belong to an office, then you could create a single usercontrol that contains two drop-down menus. The first menu displays the offices and the second is only populated (preferably by an ajax call) once an office selection has been made.

The code for retrieving the offices and departments would be relatively straightforward using the umbraco api.

The usercontrol could then save the id's of each to xml or a comma delimited list.

Alternatively, you could just allow the user to select a department and the office is implied by the choice of department. You could use the uComponent's multi-nodepicker and filter the node selection to only the Department doc type. The overhead then is in the UI code where you have to work out the Office from the Department.

To get around this, you could have a label property that simply stores the ID of the Department's Office. The Office ID could then be saved using an OnSave event handler.

Adding a custom property dependent on another in Umbraco

1 Answers