Hi Brian,

So you want to be sure that your nodes is in some order.

You can subscribe on NodeCreating event, and check order of nodes.

Read more about events - https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Reference/Events/ContentService-Events

Example:

        var parent = Services.ContentService.GetByLevel(1).FirstOrDefault();

        parent.Children().OrderBy(x => x.SortOrder);

        Services.ContentService.Save(parent);

Thanks

I want to ensure that the nodes are ALWAYS in a specific order, not just at Create time.

I've figured out that when someone Sorts the content tree nodes, the Saving and Saved events are called. However, there does not appear to be any reliable way to check that it's specifically a Sorting event.

For now this is what I'm doing:

if (e.SavedEntities.Count() > 1)
{
    // Check that they all have the same parent

    var parents = e.SavedEntities.Select(n => n.ParentId).Distinct();
    if (parents.Count() == 1)
    {
        // This MIGHT be a Sort event...

        foreach (var entity in e.SavedEntities)
        {
            // set entity.SortOrder here ...

            contentService.Save(entity);
        }
    }
}

However this seems risky to me. Surely there's a better way?

Hi Brian,

Your post i almost a year old, and you have probably solved your challenge here. But I came across this post while working on a similar case, so I thought I'd share my thoughts and a possible solution.

In my case, I needed to keep all the nodes in an order determined by a property value, basically an index. So if the user created a new sibling node and gave a value to this index property which was already used by an existing node, the existing node and all its successors would have to be moved one step down. Incrementing the index value was quite straightforward, but the sort order in Umbraco was trickier. What I ended up with was this: Catch the Saved event of ContentService and sort all the sibling nodes with the ContentService.Sort method.

Here's a little code that might help:

    public class SaveContentEventHandler : ApplicationEventHandler
    {

        protected override void ApplicationStarted(UmbracoApplicationBase umbracoApplication, ApplicationContext applicationContext)
        {
            ContentService.Saved += ContentServiceSaved;
        }

        private void ContentServiceSaved(IContentService sender, SaveEventArgs<IContent> e)
        {
            foreach (IContent node in e.SavedEntities)
            {
                if (node.ContentType.Alias == "Your content type alias")
                {
                    // Sort all siblings of this node by some property value
                    sender.Sort(node.Parent().Children().OrderBy(n => n.GetValue<int>("Some property alias")), 0, false);
                }
             }
         }
    }

This assumes you have an int property in this content type to sort by. But the key here is the first parameter of the Sort method: This is a list (IEnumerable

Note also the last parameter to Sort set to false. This means you avoid getting a bunch of reentry calls to your ContentServiceSaved handler while the Sort method is doing its saving;-)

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