Question

We have a data structure in sitecore that features the same templates at the same ‘depth’. We are making classroom content that features units, lessons, and activities in the following structure:

Unit 1
-- Lesson 1
---- Activity 1
---- Activity 2
-- Lesson 2
---- Activity 3
---- Activity 4
Unit 2
-- Lesson 3
---- Activity 5
---- Activity 6
-- Lesson 4
---- Activity 7
---- Activity 8

and so on. When I am on an activity item, I want to return the next activity item in that particular unit, and return null if there are no more activities in that unit.

The best I have been able to do so far is to target the current activities unit ancestor (easily found) and get all activities that are under it, then loop through all of them to get prev/next activities. It seems like there must be a better way to accomplish this, so I thought I’d throw it out here for ideas.

Current Code

Item unit = Sitecore.Context.Item.Axes.SelectSingleItem("ancestor-or-self::*[@@templatename='Unit']");
Item[] allActivities = unit.Database.SelectItems("ancestor-or-self::*[@@templatename='Activity']");

foreach(Item thisitem in allActivities){
    //Process here
}

Siblings (“Following” & “Preceeding”) dont work because it only returns direct siblings underneath the same lesson, not the unit as needed.

Answer 1

I think you have the right idea. A few things to take note of:

1. unit.Database.SelectItems() starts at the root of unit’s Database and doesn’t use the unit as the starting context. If you intend to traverse downwards to the get all Activities for that unit, you’ll need to use unit.Axes.SelectItems()

2. Depending on the number of Activity items per unit, you may want to consider using sitecore fast query or possibly Lucene to handle the selection.

Here is an example of how to handle the previous/next logic. The use of .FirstOrDefault() will return null if/when a previous or next sibling isn’t available.

Item unit = Sitecore.Context.Item.Axes.SelectSingleItem("ancestor-or-self::*[@@templatename='Unit']");
Item[] unitActivities = unit.Axes.SelectItems("descendant::*[@@templatename='Activity']");
// The order of 'unitActivities' defaults to the order that items appear in Sitecore tree.
// Perform additional sorting here if needed

var nextActivity = unitActivities.SkipWhile(i => i.ID != Sitecore.Context.Item.ID).Skip(1).FirstOrDefault();
var prevActivity = unitActivities.Reverse().SkipWhile(i => i.ID != Sitecore.Context.Item.ID).Skip(1).FirstOrDefault();