Best way to render arbitrary number of heterogenous Items?

I have a checkout page on my site which lists items that customer is purchasing... and below the basic list is a "Detailed Invoice" section where they can see specific info on each. Up 'til now I only had two different types of items that could be purchased, so the detailed listing was fairly easy to handle. Now I'm adding four additional and completely different things that are purchasable... so the question: What is a good way of handling this sort of rendering using Sitecore sublayouts? (Currently, I just use a Repeater and hide/show appropriate fields)

The good news is, for each line item in an order there is an associated Sitecore Item instance. If the Sitecore API was better suited to object-oriented methodology, I might create a Render() method on each of my object types in question. But of course they are each Sitecore.Data.Items.Item objects. Subclass Item? This seems like overkill for just this task...

Something I've considered is a Sublayout/user control for each different item type... and then dynamically add them to a Placeholder on the invoice page. This seems rea开发者_Go百科sonable... Thoughts? The downside is then the ugly code that has to match up the user control with the item... based on TemplateID maybe?

Anyway, just looking for some suggestions here.

Building classes to represent Sitecore data is not an unreasonable idea. This is a perfect scenario to to do it. Whenever I build project I always have classes generated using the Custom Item Generator in case I need template-specific field access. I also do everything as sublayouts so I can see your dilemma.

Are all/most of the fields unique to each product? You don't have a generic product template that each product instance uses?

These are the options I can think of myself (worst to best IMO):

1. Create a class to represent each unique template. The Custom Item Generator may work, but it may confuse you the first time. You can always make your own classes where you pass the Sitecore item into the constructor and create properties to access fields. Then use regular .NET controls and bind data to the front-end based on which template your item uses and using the strongly-type class for the template. This will likely be messy code of many if-else's.

2. Create a unique sublayout for each unique template in Sitecore. In your repeater that loops over the items, based on which template the item is, add the right sublayout to the placeholder using new Sublayout() and set the DataSource as the Sitecore item (here's code to access the DataSource). That way you abstract the implementation to each unique template.

3. Create classes for each template as mentioned in #1, but abstract across them all with an interface. In your repeater's ItemDataBound, implement data via the interface. This highly depends on how the fields compare and contrast from template to template. If you can force yourself to reduce the unique fields into the interface's members then each class that represents a template can just implement your interface. This allows for the future addition of more unique templates, as long as you continue to implement the interface.

This to me seems like a good place to use the "Presentation Inversion of Control" Sitecore pattern (as named by Aware Web).

http://www.awareweb.com/AwareBlog/Presentation%20Inversion%20of%20Control%20part%202.aspx

Though the blog post discusses this more in a context of user-placed items, it works here too. If you have a template for each product type, you could define presentation details on each (perhaps in a separate Device) that define the control which can render that item in the cart. Then you can read the RenderingReference's off the item, and place them into the page. This makes for a flexible, extensible system that allows you to handle different output for different types of products.

This is close to the solution you describe (Sublayout for each product type), but allows the sublayout to be data driven instead of conditional logic for each TemplateID. (Note you will need to assign a dummy "main layout" in the presentation details as well.)