As you may know, the main focus for Umbraco
Juno is the starter kits and skinning (so aimed at making it
easier to get started with Umbraco), if you're a seasoned Umbraco
developer you'll most likely start with a clean Umbraco
installation (and don't care that much about the starter kits).But
we're also introducing a new developer feature in Juno, that should
make one of the more difficult items in Umbraco a lot
easier!
Creating custom datatypes
Creating your own data types is very easy when using the
usercontrol wrapper method but once you want custom settings you
won't be able to do that using the usercontrol wrapper but instead
you'll need a custom data editor and for settings you'll need to
create a custom prevalue editor class which is basically a custom
control that allows you to setup the settings for a data
type.
Introducing data editor settings
By using the new DataEditorSetting attribute you'll be able to
dynamically generate the data type settings editor, eliminating the
need for a custom prevalue editor class.
100 lines of code reduced to 2
The data editor settings should be a huge time saver for Umbraco
devs since there is no more need to create a custom prevalue editor
class anymore (and taking care of the whole crud of the settings),
but it's just a matter of adding a property on your
AbstractDataEditor and marking that with the DataEditorSetting
attribute.
Sample:
[DataEditorSetting("Limit", description = "Maximum number of
characters")]
public string Limit { get; set; }
Will result in this (if you don't specify the type a text field
will be used):
So the custom prevalue editor class (which is easily around 100
lines of code) is simply replaced by a property and an attribute,
it's that easy!
Also no more need to figure out how to use content pickers,
media pickers, … Since its a breeze to use them, simply set the
type to the one you want to use
[DataEditorSetting("Content picker demo",
type = "
umbraco.editorControls.SettingControls.Pickers.Content,
umbraco.editorControls",
description = "content picker")]
public string
TestContentPicker { get; set; }
Result:
21 Default data editor setting types
If you don't specify the type a simple text field will be used,
but there are 20 other controls available out of the box.
- Checkbox
- Checkbox list
- Content Picker
- Content Picker with XPath option
- Date picker
- Date picker with time
- Dropdown list
- Document type picker
- Field picker
- List box (select single item)
- List box multiple (select multiple items)
- Media picker
- Media type picker
- Member group picker
- Member type picker
- Path picker
- Password
- Radio button list
- Text area
- Values
And how they look:
This should cover all of the common controls used in the data
type editor and of course it's possible to extend Umbraco and
create your own custom data editor settings types.
Default values
It's also possible to provide a default value, by simply
supplying the defaultValue param in the attribute
[DataEditorSetting("Limit", description = "Maximum number of
characters", defaultValue = "500")]
public string Limit { get; set; }
Want to give it a try? Download the latest nightly build of Juno.