Hey Ben,
Out of interest. What version of Umbraco are you running on?

Thanks,
Jamie

Hey Jamie,

Sorry I should have included the version, 7.5.11.

Thanks,

That's okay! I think the direction you want to go is using an IContentFinder.

My biggest concern is that if you using this it will return the IPublishedContent for the page you find in the default site and therefore you might lose context of things like menus or footer content which is relevant to the site which is missing the content.

So looking at IContentFinder it looks like I can check for a page by URL and if it is not found fallback to the default site? This would return me the IPublishedContent for the default page, which I can render. I don't suppose you have an example of this?

I have also been playing around with custom templating, so for all of these brands I use the same master page. For each of the brand sites I have a page level property that determines the site theme and ultimately where to look for the master page etc. I think this overcomes the issue you were concerned about? The following code from the Default controller highlights how I an doing this:

    public class DefaultController : RenderMvcController
{
    /// <summary>
    /// The default controller method
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="model">
    /// The model.
    /// </param>
    /// <returns>
    /// The <see cref="ActionResult"/> to render the basic view model
    /// </returns>
    public override ActionResult Index(RenderModel model)
    {
        var currentTemplateName = model.Content.GetTemplateAlias();

        //replace the live below with the ConfigurationData.json approach or similar
        var siteTheme = model.Content.AncestorOrSelf(1).GetPropertyValue<string>("siteName");


        var templatePath = ThemeHelper.GetFinalThemePath(siteTheme, ThemeHelper.PathType.View, currentTemplateName);

        return View(templatePath, model);
    }

}

This looks promising IContentFinder tutorial

Thanks,

Hey Ben,
I can provide a simple example of IContentFinder. It's actually fairly straightforward looking at it.

using Umbraco.Core;
using Umbraco.Web.Routing;

namespace My.Website
{
    public class MultiSiteFallbackContentFinder : IContentFinder
    {
        public bool TryFindContent(PublishedContentRequest contentRequest)
        {
            // Get the current path regardless of domain
            var path = contentRequest.Uri.GetAbsolutePathDecoded();
            var contentCache = contentRequest.RoutingContext.UmbracoContext.ContentCache;

            // Find the first content node in the content cache that matches this path
            var foundContent = contentCache.GetByRoute(path);

            contentRequest.PublishedContent = foundContent;

            //If we found something return true
            return foundContent == null;
        }
    }
}

Due to the nature of how Umbraco routing the first content node that matches /buy/ or /sell/ will be the one it finds.

So if you had:

• site1.com/buy/
• site2.com/buy/

but no:
site3.com/buy/

This code would find site1.com's IPublishedContent for /buy/ not site2.com.

To wire this in, simply add an ApplicationEventHandler with the following code.

using Umbraco.Core;
using Umbraco.Web.Routing;

namespace My.Website
{
    public class BootManager : ApplicationEventHandler
    {
        protected override void ApplicationStarting(UmbracoApplicationBase umbracoApplication, ApplicationContext applicationContext)
        {
            ContentFinderResolver.Current.AddType<MultiSiteFallbackContentFinder>();
        }
    }
}

This will ensure on Application Starting the routing engine will have a content finder. It's important to add it rather than insert as this will ensure it tries to call this content finder after the built-in content finder.

Thanks,
Jamie

This looks excellent, I will give this a shot but looks promising.

Very much appreciated, thanks.

Will mark as the solution if I get it working.

Hey Ben,
I hope it works for you. Otherwise let me know and we'll see what we can do, eh?

My tests were based on a fresh install which had all site roots at the top level of Content.

Thanks,
Jamie

Hey Jamie,

I hope it works as well :-)

I'll give you a shout if not.

Thanks again,

Hey Jamie,

So I managed to get it working, if the page does not exist in the current site it picks up the fallback page.

I do have an issue, which I think you mentioned could come up. In my master page I pick up the site logo from a property defined in the page (media picker). When I load a fallback page it picks up that logo and not the logo of the site I am running from.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ben

Hey Jamie,

Thanks for the info, much appreciated. I am running into an issue though. The domain is always null, even though I have set this in the 'Culture & Hostnames'. I am doing something wrong?

Thanks,

Ben

Hey Ben,
That's odd. Have you tried republishing the XML cache? Not sure that would help but worth a try!

Thanks,
Jamie

Hey,

No luck. Very strange?!?

Hey Jamie,

Thanks for the alternative solution!

I will give it a try. I did re-save the domain which did not have any affect. It is odd that the domain is not being picked up, I can use a method to get all domains and they appear in the returned list as expected!

Thanks again,

Ben

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