Using the Source Property

For each of the properties in your template you can set a source for it, this isn’t always used but can improve user experience drastically when done throughout a site. The source field comes in to play whenever you are using any of the following fields: Droplink, Droplist, Droptree, File, Grouped Droplink, Grouped Droplist, Image, Multilist, Treelist, Rich text field and a number of others.

There are various ways of setting these up to achieve different results – but in general you are using the source to limit the set of items that can be used, and this requirement can also help you determine what kind of field to use. For example, if you have a Set of items all split down into sub folders and want the content editor to make use of the tree, you could use a TreeList or Drop Tree, but if you just want a set of items without the opportunity to see where those items are – multilists or droplinks are the way to go. For Images you’re generally just specifying where to look for and put the images within the media library, and for Rich text fields the source determines the type of editor to use (if not the default).

There are a number of options for setting the source property but not all can work with every field.

Setting the Root Node: To do this you just give the full path to the item you want to use as the ‘root’. This works with just about every field that pulls options and you can easily grab the path from the content pane when you select your desired item(looking at the Item Path). Ie: if you have a treelist and you only want to show the categories item and its children, you’d put in the path to that item: /sitecore/content/Data/Categories

Sitecore Query: This applies to a smaller set of fields (the List Fields), but gives a lot of power and is what I’ll mainly be going over. The fields you can use this with are: Checklist, Droplink, Droplist, Grouped Droplist, Grouped Droplink, or Multilist. You can also use the fast query: this has some limitations over just using sitecore query but gives benefits of better performance and using less memory.

Treelists are also a little special and can use parameters(I think some other fields will work with this as well, but I most often end up using the query on other items so I don’t have a ton of experience with this), you can specify the root item, what templates/items to display or ignore and which they can select, for example:

DataSource=/Sitecore/Content/Home/Root/Node&IncludeTemplatesForSelection=desiredTemplate1,desiredTemplate2&ExcludeTemplatesForDisplay=secretFolder&ExcludeItemsForDisplay=secretItem&AllowMultipleSelection=true

The above sets the root node to /Sitecore/Content/Home/Root/Node and allows the user to select items using desiredTemplate1 or desiredTemplate2, it also excludes secretFolder and secretItem from showing up in the list as well as allowing the user to choose more than one of the same item.

More on Sitecore Query

Using the query option over simply setting a root node improves the experience for your clients as well as helps to keep your data accurate. If you don’t want them to be able to pick a certain template or value or need to select something dependent on a specific axes – using sitecore query will make it possible.

In the source field, your queries need to begin with query: followed by your query. I’m going to go over a few examples I’ve found useful, but for a more detailed explanation of using Sitecore Query take a look at the Data Definition Reference, there is a Sitecore Query section that explains all the details!

So, a few useful tidbits:

* grabs all the children of a node: query:/sitecore/content/home/dessert/*  <--  the * grabs every child and / followed by text denotes the exact item name you’re looking at. So you could also mix this up a bit and return query:/sitecore/home/*/pie/* <-- this will grab all the items that have a parent pie from any item under home with the pie grandchild.

. references the context item, this can be handy if you need to find the ancestors, children or anything along the axes (if you need just the parent, use: .. ): query:./pies/* <-- if we were the dessert item, this would grab all the grandchildren with the parent pie.

// is the descendant axis – this should be used Very sparingly but can be done the following way: query:/sitecore/content/home//pie/* <-- this grabs all the items with a parent pie under home. So that would include, home/pie/*, home/anything/pie/* and so on. The fear with using this is that you’re going to return the whole tree or a whole section which might have thousands of items, so when considering using the descendant axis or any query, be mindful of the result set you will get.

@ denotes a field, and @@ denotes an xml attribute for the item, you’ll probably be using mainly @@templatename or @@templateid.

For example: query:/sitecore/content/home/dessert/*[@pastry=’1’] <-- this grabs all the items under desserts which have the checkbox ‘pastry’ checked (so it might return pies).

Sitecore query also supports the xpath axes, allowing you to use things like ancestor-or-self, following and preceeding (siblings) and so on:

query:./ancestor-or-self::*[@@templatename='Site']/Data/Touts/*

For a more practical example in a multisite solution, the above takes the current item, finds an ancestor or itself that represents the top ‘site’ item and then find the Data folder and then grabs all the children of the Touts folder.

Logical operators can be used to combine options as well, so we could look for query:./*[@@templatename='template1' or @@templatename='template2'] or something more like query:./pies/*|./cakes/* <-- this would give both children of pies and cakes instead of choosing one or the other.

There are also functions you can use (here’s a link with a listing of a number of useful functions), primarily I end up using: position(), last(), and contains()

To use them, you’d do something like query:./*[position()=1] <-- grabs the first item

query:./*[position()=last()] <-- grabs the last item

query:./*[contains(@ingredients,’apple’)] <-- grabs the items with ‘apple’ in their ingredients field, this could also be written as: query:./*[@ingredients = '%apple%']

To test out any query, you can always open up the developer center and then open the xpath builder. You do not need query: before your query but you do need to include fast: if you want to use the fast query.

These queries can become pretty complex depending on your needs, but that initial work can leave content editors with a very easy to use and understand set of items and fields. Leave a comment if you know of any good query examples or are wondering how to form a query to meet your needs (I’ll try to help)!