Hi Jason

Its a fairly typical thing to do in Umbraco. From what I read your approach sounds about right. The Feedback items wont require a Template just a DocumentType and unless you provide a url to the items on the page no one will know where they actually are nor be able to navigate to them even if they did know the address of the items, it would have no template so it would render the Umbraco 404 this page is intentionally Ugly page.

So structure wise for your doctypes I would look at something like this.

Feedback Container (document type, no template)

    feedback item (document type, no template)

If you want the feedback node to exist as a node inside of your main content tree make sure you add an umbracoNaviHide true false property to the feedback container to hide it.

Then for the sidebar either create a new Partial or Macro Partial that first finds the root of the feedback. EG if the widget was on the homepage you could write a partial that looked something like this.

@inherits UmbracoTemplatePage
@{
    var feedbackRoot = Model.Content.DescendantsOrSelf("FeedbackContainer").FirstOrDefault();
}
@* list out your feedback nodes *@
@foreach(var feedback in feedbackRoot.Children){
    <div>@feedback.Name</div>
    etc etc etc...

}

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your response. Is there any way in which this can be modified to only output one piece of feedback at random?

So far I have the following that I came up with myself (currently stored in a partial) but unfortunately this doesn't really seem to return anything.

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage
@{
  var homepage = CurrentPage.AncestorsOrSelf(1).First();
  var feedbackOverview = homepage.feedbackOverviews.First();
  int totalFeedback = feedbackOverview.Children().Count();
  Random rnd = new Random();
  int feedbackNumber = rnd.Next(0, totalFeedback);
  var item = feedbackOverview.Next(feedbackNumber);                   
}

<span class="sideContentHeading">.Client Feedback</span>
    <div class="clientFeedback">
        <div class="clientFeedbackContent">
            @item.bodyText
        </div>
        <span class="clientFeedbackAuthor">@item.feedbackAuthor</span>
        <span class="clientFeedbackDate">@item.feedbackDate</span>
    </div>

Hi Jason

Definitely. You want is the .Random() extension.

@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoTemplatePage
@{
  var homepage = Model.Content.AncestorsOrSelf(1).First();
  var feedbackOverview = homepage.feedbackOverviews.First();

  // the following will get you a single random item from the child collection

  var item = feedbackOverview.Children.Random();            
}

<span class="sideContentHeading">.Client Feedback</span>
    <div class="clientFeedback">
        <div class="clientFeedbackContent">
            @item.bodyText
        </div>
        <span class="clientFeedbackAuthor">@item.feedbackAuthor</span>
        <span class="clientFeedbackDate">@item.feedbackDate</span>
    </div>

I wrote a cheetsheat a while back for v6 that applies to v7 also. It would be helpful for you I think http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/umbraco-v6-mvc-razor-cheatsheets

Peter

This seems to generate the following error:

Line 4:      var feedbackOverview = homepage.feedbackOverviews.First();
Compiler Error Message: CS1061: 'Umbraco.Core.Models.IPublishedContent' does not contain a definition for 'feedbackOverviews' and no extension method 'feedbackOverviews' accepting a first argument of type 'Umbraco.Core.Models.IPublishedContent' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Thanks for the link as well. I was referring to the following hence why I could not see the Random() function:

http://our.umbraco.org/documentation/Cheatsheets/DynamicNodeRazor.pdf

Great thanks!

No problems glad I was able to help :)

is working on a reply...