Simon J Ovens
Feb 18, 2017
  3965
(0 votes)

How to get the current page's category from a block and use Find to search for all pages that match the category.

In my application I created a block that showed all related pages based on the parent pages category. 
To achieve this I created a new category field called Location, the idea behind this field is to only select one location per page hence the call below to get the First() location. You could use .In() if you required to match against multiple.
In the block controllers ActionResult() method I get the parent page object by using the ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IPageRouteHelper>() .  
In the search query you can see that I first Filter() on the Location category field and call Match() to get the pages that match the parent page's Location.
I then use Filter() and Match() to exclude the parent page from the results based on the ContentGUID.  

Note: The code below has no exception handling for blog readability so this would need to be added in a real world application.

    public class RelatedHomesBlockController : BlockController<RelatedHomesBlock>
    {
        private readonly IPageRouteHelper _pageRouteHelper;
        public IClient FindServiceClient { get; private set; }

        public RelatedHomesBlockController(IClient client)
        {
            FindServiceClient = client;
            _pageRouteHelper = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IPageRouteHelper>();
        }

        public override ActionResult Index(RelatedHomesBlock currentBlock)
        {
            var currentPage = (_pageRouteHelper.Page as AccommodationPage);
            var currentPageCategory = currentPage.Location.First();
            var contentResult = FindServiceClient.Search<AccommodationPage>()
                                .Filter(h => h.Location.Match(currentPageCategory))
                                .Filter(h => !h.ContentGuid.Match(currentPage.ContentGuid))
                                .GetContentResult();
            var model = new RelatedHomesBlockModel
            {
                Heading = currentBlock.Heading,
                ContentResult = contentResult
            };

            return PartialView(model);
        }
    }
Feb 18, 2017

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