Wholething Fallback Text Property

This Umbraco package provides two custom text property editors that allow developers to enter "fallback value", rendered from a Mustache template. The fallback can be built from other node properties and properties of other specific nodes in the content tree.

Use-case

Editors often want the option to override images/values but it is unclear what the default value is. We feel it's a significant improvement in experience for editors to be able to see the default value before deciding to override it.

Team

This property editor is a collaboration between Harry Gordon and Wholething (Dean Leigh and Ault Nathanielsz).

Installation

You can find the package on NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Wholething.FallbackTextProperty/

Configuration and editor experience

When you configure a "Textstring with Fallback" or "Textarea with Fallback" property you must configure a Mustache template to generate the fallback value.

In the example we use the following template: {{1104:heroHeader}} - {{pageTitle}} - Bar. In this case pageTitle refers to the nodes own property, 1104:heroHeader refers to the site home node's property heroHeader and the rest is literal. The result can be seen below:

Implementation

The implementation is fairly straight-forward and involves the following:

• The property editor builds a dictionary of node properties and their values and does the same for any other nodes mentioned in the template.
• The property editor renders the fallback template but does not store that in the field value (to avoid "caching" depedent values).
• There is a value converter that returns either the entered value or renders the fallback value.

Limitations

There are a few notable limitations:

• The fallback template can only handle simple properties. For example referring to other fallback properties in a fallback template wouldn't work.
• The fallback template rendering does not currently use live values, just whatever is in the model when the editor is loaded.
• Referring to other nodes in the template by node ID is not ideal, it's a suitable proof of concept but we'd like to look at other ways (for example, by name, doc type or URL).