html widget sitecore sitecore8 sitecore-mvc

Reusable HTML Blocks in Sitecore

I'm looking for a way to create a reusable HTML widget for a website run on Sitecore 8. My original idea was to create a data template that basically consisted of a single Rich Textbox. The idea is that you could drop any number of instances of these widgets on a placeholder and it would render out the HTML from each instance of the widget on the page and in the correct placeholder.

Example: A content item called /products/my-product is based off of "Product" data template It consists of some fields on the Product template (maybe product name, price)

I'd like the ability for the content editor to quickly drop one or more instances of the HTML widget on the page (say, in the right rail or in a different placeholder on the sublayout. I know I could just throw a "notes" field on the product template, but I'd like to make it more dynamic so that they can add several instances of this HTML widget and place them anywhere they desire.

I quickly realized that because we need the ability for multiple instances of this widget, a data template was not enough because each instance of the widget would needs its own data to populate on the front. Thus, my idea was to allow the content editor to add HTML widgets as a child of the current item (so each item would have its own instance data). I don't think this will work because I don't know of a way to have these children tell the parent page which placeholder to put them in, so laying them out is a problem.

I also thought about somehow setting the placeholder name as a parameter or field on the data template for the HTML widget, but I couldn't figure out how to get Sitecore to dynamically add them to a placeholder when it glues everything together.

Is there a way to achieve what I'm trying to do? Seems like a reusable HTML (or other kind of widget, for that matter) would be a fairly common need. I feel like there's an easy Sitecore way to handle this that I'm missing and overcomplicating the solution.

Solution

From what I understand, you're looking for Datasource field of a component.

Basically you:

Create a data template which contains fields necessary for your component
Create a set of items using that templates
Allow authors to select one of them as the Datasource for your component.

It's built in Sitecore functionality.

Check blog post http://firebreaksice.com/using-the-datasource-field-with-sitecore-sublayouts/ or google for Sitecore datasource.