[urbanit]

Adds an opt-in Assisted Templates feature (OrchardCore.Templates.Assisted) to the Templates module. It helps editors find, view and override the shape templates of the themes and features from the Templates and Admin Templates pages, without opening the source code.

What it adds

When the feature is enabled, the Templates list (and the Admin Templates list when that feature is enabled) gets these buttons:

• Theme Templates: lists the templates of a theme, the active one by default, including those of its base themes, with a dropdown to pick another theme. Each template shows the file it comes from and its status:
  • Clone copies a Liquid template as a local template.
  • Cloned templates are monitored: the list shows whether they were edited since, and whether the theme's file changed since, e.g. after an update. Reset and Delete are available.
  • Razor templates can only be viewed, as a reference for a Liquid override with the same name.
• Feature Templates: lists the templates of the enabled features, all of them or those of one feature, with the theme or feature that overrides each one.
  • The lists can be filtered by status, by language (Liquid or Razor), and by what the templates render (front end or admin, guessed from their names).
  • Bulk actions clone, reset or delete several templates.
• Alternates: for a template, lists the alternates of its shape for the content types, parts and fields of the site, with the content types and display types each one applies to, to create or clone a template for them.
• Inspect Content, and an Inspect templates action on the content items: shows the shapes a content item renders in a display type, as a tree, with the template that renders each of them and all their alternates, the most specific first, including those of the content item itself (e.g. Content__Alias__[Alias], Content__Slug__[Slug]). The template rendering a shape, or matching an alternate, can be viewed and, if it's Liquid, cloned from there.

Modules can list the templates of other extensions by registering an ITemplateSource, and suggest alternates with an ITemplateAlternatesProvider.

Also in this PR: Add Template is the primary button of the templates lists.

The feature is documented in the Templates module docs (Assisted Templates section) and in the 4.0.0 release notes.

Known limitations

These came up in review. They are design-level, so I left them for follow-up rather than widening this PR:

• Inspect Content (front end) builds and renders the content item in the admin request. The display drivers' shapes and alternates are those of the front end, but placement comes from the admin theme, so a site theme's placement.json (hidden shapes, extra alternates) isn't reflected. Shapes a site theme template renders in its own markup aren't listed (the page says so).
• The inspection renders inside the admin page's request, so what the rendered templates push to the layout (e.g. a title segment, a script) also applies to the Inspect Content page.
• While the feature is enabled, a shape display event handler is registered for the tenant. It does nothing outside an inspection, but runs on every shape render.
• Feature Templates follows the feature order to tell which template wins. It doesn't apply the shape table's special case that moves the application module last.
• The template names are computed like BasicShapeTemplateHarvester does, in a copy of its logic. Sharing a case-preserving helper would need a change outside the module.
• The source lists are enumerated per request, without caching across requests.

Testing

• Unit tests (test/OrchardCore.Tests/Modules/OrchardCore.Templates): template sources, clone monitoring, alternates, shape inspection and authorization (47 tests).
• Functional tests:
  • AssistedTemplatesTests checks that the buttons, pages and content item action are absent until the feature is enabled, and present afterwards.
  • AdminListLayoutTests now enables the feature and renders the Theme Templates, Feature Templates and Alternates lists as grids.
• Checked manually in the browser with the Blog recipe, in both the site and the admin, including cloning from Inspect Content.

[sebastienros]

Can you put a link to the youtube video at the correct timestamp to recall what the feature was about?

[urbanit]

https://youtu.be/4nIjSBtQgx0?si=WVi8bbg1Q2aDidCC&t=2683

original discussion is here: https://github.com/orgs/OrchardCMS/discussions/19709

I will update the same discussion with new implementation

[urbanit]

Discussion updated with comment: https://github.com/orgs/OrchardCMS/discussions/19709#discussioncomment-19274871

[github-actions]

This pull request has merge conflicts. Please resolve those before requesting a review.

[grandua]

Hi @urbanit — I ran this PR through an automated review harness and two issues surfaced:

1. Authorization gap in the inspector's recent-content picker:
   GetRecentContentItemsAsync returns the 50 most recently modified items
   on index.Latest (so including unpublished) without item-level ViewContent
   filtering — a template manager who can't view a restricted item still sees
   its title and ID in the picker.
2. Missing OrchardCore.Contents dependency: OrchardCore.Templates.Assisted
   declares only OrchardCore.Templates, but the inspector and content-alternates
   provider need IContentManager/IContentDefinitionManager — enabling the
   feature on a tenant without Contents enabled fails at DI time when opening
   the inspector/source pages.

Full line-by-line breakdown:
grandua/dw-public-reviews#16
— hope this helps polish Assisted Templates.

[urbanit]

Thanks for the review @grandua, both were real. Fixed in d946efd:

Picker authorization

The inspector’s picker now only lists content items the user can view (ViewContent on each item), paging through the latest items until it has 50, and has a search box to find older ones by display text. I looked at reusing the Content Picker, but its search endpoint returns every match and only flags whether each one is viewable, so it wouldn’t have closed the gap.

Contents dependency

Everything that needs the content services moved to a new OrchardCore.Templates.ShapeTracing feature that depends on OrchardCore.Contents: Inspect Content, the Inspect templates action and the content-type alternates provider. That provider also fed the Theme/Feature Templates lists, so those pages failed without Contents too. Assisted Templates now only depends on Templates, and a functional test checks its pages on a tenant without Contents (the SaaS recipe).

[urbanit]

Content picker UI The picker’s search box and select are replaced by the content picker of the content picker fields, the same component, searching as you type. It queries its own endpoint, TemplateInspector/SearchContentItems, which applies the same authorization, so it doesn’t use the content picker’s search endpoint mentioned above. Because of this, Shape Tracing also depends on OrchardCore.ContentFields.

Drafts A content item is now listed, and inspected, in its published version when it has one, with ViewContent. A draft that was never published also requires PreviewContent, and is shown as not published. The same check applies when a content item is opened by its id in the URL. Without it, every signed-in user could see the titles of drafts, since the Authenticated role grants ViewContent by default.

Tests The functional test now checks the content picker and its search endpoint. Checked manually with a role without PreviewContent: a draft is neither listed nor inspectable by its id, and it is listed, as not published, once the role can preview content.

[grandua]

Thanks for the review @grandua, both were real. Fixed in d946efd:

Picker authorization

The inspector’s picker now only lists content items the user can view (ViewContent on each item), paging through the latest items until it has 50, and has a search box to find older ones by display text. I looked at reusing the Content Picker, but its search endpoint returns every match and only flags whether each one is viewable, so it wouldn’t have closed the gap.

Contents dependency

Everything that needs the content services moved to a new OrchardCore.Templates.ShapeTracing feature that depends on OrchardCore.Contents: Inspect Content, the Inspect templates action and the content-type alternates provider. That provider also fed the Theme/Feature Templates lists, so those pages failed without Contents too. Assisted Templates now only depends on Templates, and a functional test checks its pages on a tenant without Contents (the SaaS recipe).

-Thanks for the quick turnaround, @urbanit — I've re-run the automated
review against the updated head (d946efd, which includes your
picker-authorization and clone fixes).

Verdict: your authorization fix no longer shows up in the findings,
but the re-review still flags two MEDIUM correctness issues on the new
head — notably, clone provenance can survive template deletion while
Assisted Templates is disabled, leaving stale provenance that
misclassifies a recreated template as a clone. Details:
grandua/dw-public-reviews#16 (review)

Heads-up: this pass covers head d946efd — anything pushed after it
needs a fresh run. Ping me and I'll kick one off, or @sebastienros can
install the app on the repo — https://github.com/apps/digitalworker-reviewer
— free during early access, to get fresh reviews automatically on every
push.