new to umbraco dev so bear with me 🙂 i've managed to create rcl package with custom property edt / datatype. So content manager can set the value for it on a page and it is saved. All good there. However where I have my doubts if I am doing it the correct way is providing the front end part for the site visitor the content editor sets the value for the page. the page offcourse has its template (cshtml) in Umbraco settings. What we did now is getting the value from the prop editor and send that to the partial in the RCL plugin to render. simplified like: @{ var viewData = new ViewDataDictionary(ViewData); viewData.Add("parameter1", Model.Value("s4atestplugin")); } @Html.Partial("Partials/pluginpartial.cshtml", Model, viewData) Is this how it should be done? I've read about propertyconverters but do not really understand if that is what I am or should be looking for. Sometimes it can be advantage, but also it can be disadvantage that the partial is compiled into the rcl dll. So the template cannot be changed by the user of the plugin. (other than via css etc)

Think with umbraco/uForms there is an override mechanism for having a cshtml file in a corresponding position in the site structure. Perhaps you can leverage that to provide template tweaking by the end user?

I think most packages leave the frontend implementation up to the user. So they just return a model for the property and do not implement it in a view

our front end is part of the project. think of it as articles, blogs, front end crm functions, product pages, etc not really something for end user. But for the discussion and sample project lets just say we do something like: content editor sets via the prop editor a categorie to show on the page. So on the page we will provide a list of articles for this choosen category. user clicks on article in list and is forwarded to the detail page for the article. the content comes from different datasouces and the plugin takes care of that.

In that case you would probably either document for the user what they need to set up or include a view in the RCL. As @Mike Chambers mentioned above - the Umbraco Forms package includes a view for rendering the forms. The thing about RCLs is that they only place the view there if it doesn't already exist at the target location, so users can adapt the view by pasting it into the same location and changing it.

ah wow "so users can adapt the view by pasting it into the same location and changing it." << this might just be the thing I was looking for

This is standard RCL functionality so not really an Umbraco thing. PropertyValueConverters wouldn't solve your specific usecase but it basically allows you to convert whatever is saved in the database into a model before it is received in the frontend. So say you create a new property editor for an integration with a PIM where the user can select a product - then you may not want to then save an entire product model into the property in the database when the node is saved as that would just be a snapshot of the data at the time the editor saved it. Instead you may save a SKU fx. Then in a PropertyValueConverter for that custom property editor you could get the sku, fetch the product from the PIM and return a full product model - which would then be up to date data for the time of rendering. (Note that the valueconverter is hit every time the property is called, so in this scenario you would want to cache the fetch from the PIM)

"This is standard RCL functionality so not really an Umbraco thing." I ment more the not including a view for the frond end in a plugin.

Yea that is one of the problems of including view code, the way Umbraco Forms gets around this is to include a viewcomponent, a taghelper and a macro all pointing to the view they included. Then they document for the user what they need to put in their view for the block / page where the property is used: https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-forms/developer/rendering-forms

read about macro's not the taghelper.. thanks for pushing me in the right direction of the forms module. I will have a look on how they do it.

It will not, I would personally pick the taghelper approach I think

oke thank you for thinking along on this. I will look into the taghelper option