Self Update Content Channel Items

You already know from the sections above that content channel items will appear in the content channel on or after the Start date and before the Expire date. But what if you have an item that needs to be shown or removed more dynamically, perhaps based on an event that only happens every few months? You could manually update the Start and Expire dates every time the event approaches and passes, but that can be a pain. That’s where the Self Update feature comes to the rescue.

Content channel items can be shown on your website in several different ways. It’s all driven by the Lava template you provide. Because Lava can look at the content channel item’s attributes, you can use those attributes to control how items display on your site. The best part is that the Content Channel Item Self Update job automates changing those attribute values for you, automatically changing what’s shown on your site.

Getting it Set Up

There are a few steps to this process, but the automation that comes with it makes it worth the effort. You’ll need to get some attributes set up for your content channel items, and then you’ll need to tell the Content Channel Item Self Update job how to find those attributes. There are a couple more steps along the way, and we’ll walk you through it all below.

Adding Content Channel Item Attributes

You’ll start by adding at least two new attributes to your content channel items. One of the attributes must be of type Lava. We’ll talk about the second attribute in a bit, but let’s focus on the Lava attribute for now. Pictured below is an example of how you might set this up from Admin Tools > System Settings > Entity Attributes using an Entity Type of Content Channel Item.

You might notice there isn’t a Default Value provided in the example pictured above. You can certainly add your Lava here so that it automatically gets applied to your content channel items. Just keep in mind that changing the Default Value Lava here will not automatically change the Lava that’s already been applied to existing items.

Next, let’s add our second attribute. In this example we’re going to keep it simple and use an attribute of type Boolean. This will give us a basic ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to work with. We’ll use this attribute to indicate whether the content channel item should be displayed on the website.

Setting the Attribute Values

With both attributes in place, we’re ready to see how they look on the content channel item itself. You’ll need to access the item to fill in values for these attributes initially, unless they have been populated by a Default Value configured on the attributes.

Pictured above you can see the Lava we’re using for this item, and the Show Item attribute we also added.

The Lava in this example will return either 'True' or 'False' depending on whether an event’s date is in the future. This Lava will be evaluated by the Content Channel Item Self Update job when it runs. The result is used by the job to update the Show Item attribute, which can accept a value of 'True' or 'False'. Remember, the Lava must produce an output that makes sense to the attribute being updated by the job. If our Lava produced a date, then this wouldn’t work because a date doesn’t make sense to our Boolean Show Item attribute.

Setting up the Job

With the attributes and their values in place, the hard part is over. All we need to do now is tie it all together by setting up the job.

With the job and attributes in place, our webpage can now reference the Show Item attribute’s value to have Rock automatically display or hide this content channel item.