New custom filters in Fluid, Media options admin page - This week in Orchard (02/10/2020)
We prepared two interesting demos for this week: The first one is about having new useful custom filters in Liquid to make formatting numbers and string easier. The other upcoming feature is about how you can show your settings from your appsettings.json files without having the need to open these files in your file system.
Orchard Core updates
Restrict Content Type Admin Menus to only create the specified Content Type
Several issues fixed regarding creating content items from the admin UI:
- Restored the new button specific to each content item when user filters by content type or accesses the content item list interface by link for a single content type in the admin menu.
- Fixed the behavior of the admin menu's links to Menus and Content Items: if they are not defined inside a recipe, they have a dynamic behavior and it causes an issue if the user defines a link for a specific content type inside the admin menu.
- In the BlogTheme, the Content Items link of the admin menu is defined in the recipe and doesn't have dynamic behavior.
See the following GIF here where you can also see the creation of a new content type admin menu node that is about to list the Article content items. The new button under the new Article menu option is just about to create new Article content items.
Update Blob Storage to search folder hierarchies
The problem is that the method that is responsible to handle Blob Storage items does not correctly implement the includeSubDirectories = true option - it never did. This is because it's not like a normal file system where you can make one request and list everything, so it would have to make recursive requests for every directory it finds.
Ironically the media step driver does this recursion already itself, but the recipe step does not when using Include All Media. So the short term workaround should be to specify the attached fields' folder's media fields, rather than Include All Media when creating the step. This issue withincludeSubDirectories = true affects this step, and the GraphQL media query - it's the only place we use it. So, Blob storage never handled searching subfolders correctly, so this should now work for the media step, and better in GraphQL queries (behaves identically to normal file system now).
Now if you would like to get the content of the directory including subfolders too, the GetDirectoryContentFlatAsync method in the BlobFileStore class will return the files inside the subfolders too.
Rename Smtp admin menu to Email
The goal of renaming Smtp to Email is to make sure that you can edit settings related to sending emails even if you don't know what SMTP is (and this screen is also for testing email sending).
Toggle password visibility on the login form and on the setup screen
The login form and the setup screen now support toggling the password visibility, so can make sure that you typed the correct passwords in these textboxes.
Demos
Media options admin page
In the appsettings.json file, you can define your media-related settings, e.g. change the list of allowed file extensions or the path used when serving media assets. The documentation includes all the default configuration values that can be overridden.
The goal of this feature is to have a read-only version of the settings where you can see these configuration values without needing to navigate to your appsettings.json file to see the configured values.
Head to YouTube to check out this short recording about this upcoming feature!
New custom filters in Fluid
Fluid is an open-source .NET templating engine that is as close as possible to the Liquid template language. It's a secure template language that is also very accessible for non-programmer audiences. It also contains an ASP.NET Core MVC View Engine. And of course, Orchard Core is using Fluid too to generate templates.
If you would like to render numbers correctly, Fluid just renders them in a format 124456789, but you could not format it like for example 12,445.68 )(and you can't do it in Liquid by default either). We already had the format_date helper in Fluid where we can use the .NET formats, so the new helpers added are format_number and format_string, which are using the .NET format methods. They are not standard in Liquid, but there is nothing in Liquid to help achieving these.
format_number: It will format the number with the current culture. If you pass "N", which means number in the standard numeric format strings, then it will use the number format that we have just mentioned above. So, to generate 12,445.68 from the 12445.6789 value, you can do that like12445.6789 | format_number: "N"You can find a documentation about the standard numeric format strings here.format_string: In this case, you can pass a string with a String.Format inside and after using theformat_stringyou can pass the values. Let's say you have the following expression:"hello {0} {1:C}" | format_string: "world" 123. This would be rendered as hello world $123.00. Notice that here we also used the currency ("C") format specifier to convert a number to a string that represents a currency amount.
The documentation of Fluid contains the available custom filters where you can learn more about the other features of Fluid too.
Head to YouTube to check out the recording about the new custom filters!
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