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I have what I feel like should be a normal activity but I am not seeing any good tools to accomplish this in DNN.  I could use some advice on how others might approach this task.

I need to create a "New Products" page.  The page contains lists of products divided by category.  Along with these lists, there is some other info on the page, an intro paragraph, a concluding paragraph, and a variable number of linked images.  Sometimes there can be 10 separate lists on each page and there are about 10 of these created per month.  If the lists are created as stand alone data objects, it is going to quickly become problematic to manage from a data standpoint.  For this reason I wish to encapsulate all of the information related to this page into a single data object.

The problem I am running into here is that the product lists need to be grouped with the title of the section in which they are contained and there can be 'N' lists.  In data, this breaks down to a minimum of two fields, a delimited list of productIds and a title.  These fields need to be connected, or there must be some way to programatically determine that the list title is associated with the products.  I have tested with XMod Pro and the newest version of 2SexyContent but neither has the ability to create groups of fields as described.

Somewhat linked to this, neither of these modules allow a variable number of fields in the data entry/content entry form.  By this I mean that if you need to create a list of items, you must do it with a single text field that holds a list of delimited keys that can be parsed.  You cannot specify a "Product Key" field in the data entry form and then click to add another, there are a fixed number of fields.  Since there is the lack of ability to use anything but a fixed number of fields, it naturally follows that there wouldn't be the notion of a field group as it wouldn't be necessary since each field present would be well defined and known before the data was created.

Call me crazy, but this sounds like normal activity when dealing with data.  Has anyone dealt with this and what was the solution?

I think you are suggesting put a category field in the database, then pull all products with only that category.  Order matters and I have an additional field I need to include with each book.  For these reasons I don't think what you suggest will work, but I'm still trying to contemplate it to see if there is something that isn't sinking in.  To be specific, here is what I am trying to recreate, http://www.abc-clio.com/landingpage/N... as output and here is a screenshot showing the part of the input form that is used to create each "Book Section"  http://www.abc-clio.com/design/FieldG....

In the screenshot i have highlighted the buttons that allow new field groups to be added to the input form.  You can see here where the user enters a section title, then a variable number of books(designated by ISBN) along with a paragraph of "marketing text" (used to say something that isn't normally associated with the book data in the database).  Clicking "+ Book list" adds another area to specify a book and marketing text.  There are other fields not shown in the screenshot as I couldn't size it appropriately to fit it all.

I am not required to have the same exact data entry setup, but everything needs to be contained within a single data entry area, or done in some way that is very easy.  Needing to set things up in multiple places then come back and seem everything together will be too difficult for the marketing team to handle.  Also keeping the Book Sections as separate data objects will quickly become a data management problem as there are going to be around 50-100 lists created per month.

I hope this clarifies things a little.  It's very easy in concept, but surprisingly difficult in practice.

Andy,

Open Web Studio has a pretty good data templating mechanism for displaying data breaking on group headers.  OWS has a bit of a learning curve, but that is the tool I would use to display data in this way without building out a custom module.

Hopefully that xml idea works for you.  If not, let us know and we can help you explore other options.

Good luck,

Scott