Question

I built a custom module that manages appointments for a service-based company. All of the current functionality is contained in the admin section. I have not used a single ContentItem or ContentPart. All the models are just plain records.

I’m looking to create a widget to expose the ability to sign up for an appointment from the front end. I have a partial view and a controller that handles the display and form submit, but I’m not sure how to tie that into a widget that can be placed in one of the content zones of the front-end.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching this, and can’t find a good path to follow. (I’ve tried a few and got sub-optimal results)

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The best answer for me was to create a widget Type definition in the migration.cs file of the module:

ContentDefinitionManager.AlterTypeDefinition("CreateAppointmentWidget",
    cfg => cfg
        .WithPart("WidgetPart")
        .WithPart("CommonPart")
        .WithSetting("Stereotype", "Widget"));

Then create a handler for that widget at /MyModule/Handlers/CreateAppointmentWidgetHandler.cs:

public class CreateAppointmentWidgetHandler : ContentHandler
{
    private readonly IRepository<FieldTechRecord> _repository;

    public CreateAppointmentWidgetHandler(IRepository<FieldTechRecord> repository)
    {
        _repository = repository;
    }

    protected override void BuildDisplayShape(BuildDisplayContext context)
    {
        base.BuildDisplayShape(context);

        if (context.ContentItem.ContentType == "CreateAppointmentWidget")
        {
            CreateAppointmentViewModel model = new CreateAppointmentViewModel(_repository.Fetch(x => x.IsActive));
            context.Shape.AppointmentModel = model;
        }
    }
}

Then create a matching widget template at /MyModule/Views/Widget-CreateAppointmentWidget.cshtml that inserts the Partial View:

@Html.Partial("CreateAppointment", (MyModule.Models.Views.CreateAppointmentViewModel)Model.AppointmentModel)

The above code grabs the partial view /MyModule/Views/CreateAppointment.cshtml.

Thanks to Giscard’s suggestion, I was able to correct the links rendered from CreateAppointment.cshtml by using @Url.RouteUrl() and defining named routes to point where I needed the action and ajax requests to go.

The nice thing about this solution is that it provided a way to create the widget without having to rework my models to use Orchards ContentPart functionality.