As I understand you correct you want to get a list of articles with max items from each writer but all together sorted by date, right?

In principle this is a perfect senario for LinqToUmbraco. Otherwise I would recommend to implement an XsltExtension like this one

Snippet

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Xml.XPath;
using umbraco.presentation.nodeFactory;
 
namespace MyMasterNamespace
{
    public class XsltExtensions
    {
        public static XPathNodeIterator GetLastNewsItems(int maxNumberOfItemsPerWriter)
        {
            var doc = new XDocument();
            var root = new XElement("NewsItems");
            doc.Add(root);
 
            var rootNode = new Node(1139);
            var selectedArticles = new List<Node>();
 
            foreach (Node writer in rootNode.Children)
            {
                var articles = writer.Children.Cast<Node>().OrderByDescending(x=>x.CreateDate).ToList();
                selectedArticles.AddRange(articles.Count > maxNumberOfItemsPerWriter
                                              ? articles.Take(maxNumberOfItemsPerWriter)
                                              : articles);
            }
 
            foreach (var selectedArticle in selectedArticles.OrderByDescending(x=>x.CreateDate))
            {
                var item = new XElement("Item");
                root.Add(item);
                item.Add(new XAttribute("image", selectedArticle.GetProperty("writerPicture")));
                item.Add(new XAttribute("wCaption", selectedArticle.GetProperty("wCaption")));
                item.Add(new XAttribute("nodeName", selectedArticle.Name));
                item.Add(new XAttribute("id", selectedArticle.Id));
            }
 
            var nav = doc.CreateNavigator();
            return nav.Select("/NewsItems");
        }
    }
}

Then you can use this extension like this:

<xsl:for-each select="MyExtensionAlias.GetLastNewsItems(1)/Item">

<div class="writers">
        <img src="{@writerPicture}" />
        <a href="{umbraco.library:NiceUrl(@id)}"><span><xsl:value-of select="@wCaption"/></span></a>
        <br/><xsl:value-of select="@nodeName"/>
</div>

</xsl:for-each>

hth, Thomas

Hi Thomas,

Perhaps maxItem approach is wrong. To clarify, for example if authorA has several articles at his node, I need to show only the last created one. The process is same for other authors as well.

By the way I am new completely to Umbraco, would you pls guide me how I can add XsltExtension to Umbraco?

If you want the list of the last articles from every author sorted by author this is no problem with xslt. But if you want to have the list sorted by createDate of the article you propably would use the xsltextension.

For a guide how to use XsltExtensions take a look here or take a look into the umbraco.tv series

hth, Thomas

That was even a big help Thomas btw. As you have just pointed out, I want the list of the last articles from every author sorted by author. Based on my first post,  Where should I update code snippet in order to get that output?

To clarify the code: first you are iterating through every writer. For each writer you are starting a new div with class writer. Then you are iterating through all articles of the writer, but you are only using the first article for the output.

hth, Thomas

And if you need a good introduction into xslt with umbraco use the great articles from Doug:

• http://blog.percipientstudios.com/2009/4/11/anatomy-of-an-umbraco-xslt-file.aspx
• http://blog.percipientstudios.com/2009/5/5/your-first-umbraco-xslt-macro.aspx
• http://blog.percipientstudios.com/2009/9/21/advanced-xslt-with-net-namespaces.aspx

Cheers, Thomas

Thanks for help so far Thomas. It helped a lot to understand the basic of xslt.

Glad I could help, enjoy Umbraco ;-)

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