Umbraco 7 Partial View Macro Rendering

In Umbraco 7.0.3 I:

Created a Data Type called Macro Container with Property editor of Macro container
Created Document Type called Contact Form with Property called Body with Type Macro Container
Created Partial View called _contactForm.cshtml (in Views\MacroPartials)
Created Macro called Contact Form with MVC Partial view _contactFrom.cshtml
Added Content of type Contact Form called Contact Us
Added Contact Form macro to the Macro Container property called Body in my Contact Us page

I then have a Surface Controller that I call with some AJAX to display the page (more specifically the Body property of the page):

public class JsController : SurfaceController
{
    public ActionResult GetPage(int id)
    {
        var page = new Node(id);

        if (page == null || page.GetProperty("body") == null)
            return Content(@"Hmm, something went wrong. Unable to find what you're looking for.");

        return Content(page.GetProperty("body").Value);
    }
}

This setup almost works but the problem is that instead of the rendered form, what is returned is:

<!--?UMBRACO_MACRO macroAlias="ContactForm" /-->

So now I need to render this macro\form\partial view...I think that I probably need to do it in the Controller, but if I can do it on the other side (via Javascript) that would work as well. Is there an Umbraco function I can call in the controller to render a macro based on the page id and macro alias?

Upvotes: 2

Answers (3)

Serj Sagan

Reputation: 30208

So after spending several hours fuming at how painfully stupid the Umbraco team made this process, reading threads like this and this, I finally figured out a fairly ugly, but working way...things would have been so much more simple if the PublishedContentRequest class constructor was not internal!

Anyways, here's what I had to do: 1) Extend EnsurePublishedContentRequestAttribute

public class CreatePublishedContentRequestAttribute
    : EnsurePublishedContentRequestAttribute
{
    public CreatePublishedContentRequestAttribute() : base(0) { }

    protected override void ConfigurePublishedContentRequest(
        PublishedContentRequest publishedContentRequest,
        ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        var contentId = filterContext.RouteData.Values["id"];
        int id = 0;

        if (contentId != null && int.TryParse(contentId.ToString(), out id))
        {
            var content = UmbracoContext.ContentCache.GetById(id);
            publishedContentRequest.PublishedContent = content;

            var defaultLanguage = Language.GetAllAsList().FirstOrDefault();
            publishedContentRequest.Culture = (defaultLanguage == null)
                ? CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture
                : new CultureInfo(defaultLanguage.CultureAlias);

            publishedContentRequest.ConfigureRequest();

            HttpContext.Current.Session["PublishedContentRequest"]
                = publishedContentRequest;
        }
    }
}

2) Redirect to an action decorated with this attribute that redirects back to my GetPage action and retrieve the PCR from the Session. Now we can render our macro:

public ActionResult GetPage(int id)
{
    var publishedContent = UmbracoContext.ContentCache.GetById(id);
    if (publishedContent == null || publishedContent.GetProperty("body") == null)
    { return Content(@"Unable to find what you're looking for."); }

    if (UmbracoContext.PublishedContentRequest == null
        && Session["PublishedContentRequest"] == null)
    { return RedirectToAction("CreatePublishedContentRequest", new { id }); }

    UmbracoContext.PublishedContentRequest =
        (PublishedContentRequest) Session["PublishedContentRequest"];
    Session["PublishedContentRequest"] = null;

    UmbracoContext.HttpContext.Items["pageID"] = id;

    return Content(GetHtmlContent(publishedContent));
}

[CreatePublishedContentRequest]
public ActionResult CreatePublishedContentRequest(int id)
{
    return RedirectToAction("GetPage", new { id });
}

private string GetHtmlContent(IPublishedContent publishedContent)
{
    string content = publishedContent.GetProperty("body").Value.ToString();
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(content) || !content.Contains("UMBRACO_MACRO"))
    { return content;}

    int startIndex = content.IndexOf("macroAlias=") + 12;
    int length = content.LastIndexOf('"') - startIndex;
    var macroAlias = content.Substring(startIndex, length);

    return (Umbraco.RenderMacro(macroAlias) ?? new HtmlString("")).ToString();
}

This works, but this is some pretty hacky stuff. If the Umbraco team made the PublishedContentRequest constructor public, this could have been much, much cleaner. Of course, there's probably a better way to do this, if so, I'm all ears.

Upvotes: 5