What is the best way to associate a Nested Content node to an Umbraco Member

Question

My initial thought was to create an Umbraco Relation and associate the Umbraco Member to the Nested Content node. Sadly, I found this form post asking a similar question and as you can see in Matt Bailsford's first response:

Unfortunately nested content can't have an ID value as they don't truely exist

I did find the issue/feature that was discussed in the forum post; however, it just adds parent information to the DetachedPublishedContent object and doesn't solve my issue. After reading the form post and the conversations of Hendy Racher, Matt Bailsford and Lee Kelleher in the github pull request, I still don't understand why Nested Content doesn't create a node in Umbraco.

So basically I need the Nested Content nodes to be created as Umbraco nodes and then stored as a JSON string in the property field. There are a few ways that I see this could be accomplished:

1. Create a Custom Property Editor for Umbraco Backoffice - I would start with a copy of Nested Content and add code to create the node and attach it before saving the node as a JSON string.

2. Use the Umbraco Multinode Treepicker control - This control was suggested by Hendy and Jeavon in this forum post as a way to allow a user to select multiple content nodes. Unfortunately going this route would require the user to create the "nested content" nodes first. Then they could associate those "nested content" nodes with the original node. We really like the user experience of the Nested Content control where it allows you to create nodes dynamically in the property editor.

3. Find a way to associate the Member to the "Nested Content" node - This option would require that I store an association between the top node and it's respective "nested content" node to a Member in Umbraco. There are two issues that come to mind when trying to go this route:

   1. How should I associate the "nested content" node to the Member in a standard Umbraco way? - I immediately think of creating a link table in the database but, in my understanding, that is not the standard Umbraco way. I am still fuzzy about the best way to do this inside Umbraco.
   2. Is there a way to uniquely identify the "nested content" node? - I realize there is a sort order value being set according to the pull request I found above but if the user reorders the nested content items will it change the "nested content" node to member association?

At this point, I am leaning towards going with option 1, but I wonder if option 3 is a better direction. In reality, I don't believe this is a new problem that someone hasn't already solved, and I hate to create another custom property editor if there is one just like it out there already.

So if you know of a better way to solve this problem please let me know.

Answer 1

The problem is - as you mention it - that Nested Content nodes aren't really real nodes. I don't think the right way to solve your problem is to try hacking Nested Content into doing something it really wasn't created to do.

The problem about creating nodes and also having references to them on the Nested Content node is that essentially every node in Umbraco needs to "live" somewhere.

You could choose to say that a node lives under the parent it is nested into, but how would you then differentiate between nested nodes and actual child nodes - this would require another hack as it is really working around how nodes are meant to be structured and handled in the Umbraco core.

Even if you did manage to get this working, I suspect you would have a lot to deal with to actually make it work as good as Nested Content currently does:

• You would have somehow wrap every single node in the Nested Content editor into a object to be able to store meta data like the node ID it is connected to and the sortOrder when reordering all of the nested content nodes you have on there.

(edit: I think it actually already stores some sort of wrapper object here, but you would have to change the logic in here to actually handle a reference to another node instead of just deserializing json stored here, as a node)

• You would also have to manually hook into events making sure the actual edits you do while on the parent node actually ends up being persisted to the nested nodes.
• Deleting a nested content node, or a parent that has any nested nodes - you would have to handle deleting any orphaned nodes.

There's most likely a lot of stuff I've missed but my point is - you will have a lot of trouble trying to do this.

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I think you should consider another approach if you really need to do this:

It would be possible to create a picker similar to a normal node picker, that simply allows you to browse through nodes as a normal picker would do. When you pick a node, instead of just selecting it, it should then fetch the nested content nodes and show those in the UI.

There's however the little quirk that you could essentially be having multiple properties storing each their set of nested content nodes on one single content item - so you would need some nice way of handling this in the UI.

When you select one or multiple of the nested nodes, what your picker would store would be something similar to [guid-of-the-real-node]_[propertyAlias]_[guid-of-nested-content-item].

I am not certain if Nested Content ever got the GUID unique ID/key feature implemented - Matt and I discussed it some time last year and we tried adding it in, in a custom build I needed for a project. If it isn't there I would suggest you ask Matt if he can get that in. It was essentially just giving each nested content item a "fake" unique ID (GUID) that you could use to identify it from other nested content items stored in the property. (You would have to ask Matt about the status of this)

Doing this would allow you to (on your member) have a reference that you lets you find the actual content node, then the property where the content is stored, and lastly the actual nested content node you have picked.

You should however note that this is very prone to breaking and needs a lot of null handling:

• If you change the property alias of the property you are storing nested content in on the parent, it will lose the reference.
• If you delete the content item storing the nested items, the picked items no longer exist and you have a missing reference in the picker on your member (needs null handling)
• If you delete a nested content item - same as above. You have a missing reference in your picker.

Apart from the solution above, I don't really see another way of doing this currently with the requirements you have.