We are currently use the oob page types for Blog, News and Event. We have one page for each of these types that includes a repeater to show a list of the pages of that type. We would also like to have a page that includes a repeater that shows all blog, news and event pages in one spot, sorted by their created date.
I have seen some old comments (here, here) on devnet saying that although a repeater can render multiple page types, the fields rendered must be identical across each of those page types. The workarounds suggested are either to create the same fields in each page type, or to create a custom SQL query and use a query repeater to render the data. I've done this and it works just fine, but it was pretty cumbersome to create and will be difficult to maintain. (If we want to add other page types, for example.) Can anyone suggest a more out-of-the-box method available in Kentico 10?
Update:
I'm trying to accomplish this as Brenden described, but am running into trouble. My page structure is as follows:
Root
.RollupPage (CMS.MenuItem)
..BlogPosts (CMS.Blog)
...January 2017 (CMS.BlogMonth)
....blog post 1 (CMS.BlogPost)
...February 2017 (CMS.BlogMonth)
....blog post 2 (CMS.BlogPost)
..Events (CMS.MenuItem)
...Event1 (CMS.BookingEvent)
...Event2 (CMS.BookingEvent)
I've attempted to use a universal viewer, but failed to get it to return any data.
I configured it with:
Path: /RollupPage/%
Page types: CMS.BlogPost;CMS.BookingEvent
Hierarchical Transformation: CMS.MenuItem.HierTrans1
HierTrans1 has the following transformations:
CMS.BlogPost.Default (Item transformation for type CMS.BlogPost)
CMS.BookingEvent.EventCalendarItem (Item transformation for type CMS.BookingEvent)
These aren't customized at all; they are standard OOB transformations just so I can see it work.
When I view the RollupPage, the universal viewer displays nothing.
I attempted to use a Hierarchical Viewer with the same settings as I did with the Universal Viewer. It kind-of worked. It displayed my booking events but did not display any blog posts. Yet using the same blog post transformation (CMS.BlogPost.default) with hierarchical viewer whose Path was set to /RollupPage/BlogPosts/% displayed my blog posts correctly but, obviously, did not display my booking events.
The results I've gotten so far makes me think a) something about the way I've created my pages is stopping the universal viewer from traversing the whole tree and/or b) the hierarchical viewer either only goes a couple of levels deep, or maybe it is being blocked from traversing the tree too... No events are recorded when I edit or view these web parts.
Any idea what I may be doing wrong?
You can use the Hierarchical viewer or the Universal viewer, as Brenden Kehren mentioned, to achieve the goal you are describing.
When configuring the web part you must select all the Page types that are included in the hierarchy, in your case: CMS.MenuItem, CMS.Blog, CMS.BlogMonth, CMS.BlogPost and CMSBookingEvent.
Create a Hierarchical transformation to be used with your viewer and add an Item transformation for each of the items you wish to display. Also make sure the Level setting for each transformation is configured properly (-1 applies the transformation to all levels).
For Universal viewer it is necessary to check the property Load hierarchical data in the section Extended settings of the configuration.
As an additional note, you can leave the path property empty in case you are viewing the child documents of the current page.
For reference there is also an example on the Corporate Site example site in the content tree path Examples > Web Parts > Listings and viewers > Pages > Hierarchical viewer (or Universal viewer).
Hope this helps!