This post shows two ways of using relative lookup field queries in a multisite environment.

The issue

Imagine you want to let your users pick sub Pages of the current site in a multilist. You can set something like the following as source in the template builder:

DataSource=/sitecore/content/home&IncludeTemplatesForSelection=Sub Page&IncludeTemplatesForDisplay=Main Page, Sub Page

Notice that the site root /sitecore/content/home is hard coded. This will not work if you have multiple site roots in your content folder:

• sitecore
  • content
    • Site A [Template: Site Root]
      • Home
    • Site B [Template: Site Root]
      • Home

Solution 1: Relative queries

Of course you can just set /sitecore/content as root in the query but that is not very user friendly. To automatically restrict the items to the current site, there is a solution out of the box using relative queries:

query:./ancestor-or-self::*[@@templatename='Site Root']

This works fine but you loose the ability to use the IncludeTemplatesForSelection and IncludeTemplatesForDisplay parameters.

Solution 2: Replace SiteRoot token through custom getLookupSourceItems processor

Fortunately, it is possible to hook in to the getLookupSourceItems pipeline and modify the DataSource query at runtime. I wrote a simple processor that replaces a $siteRoot token with the path of the parent site root item. Once included in your solution, you can then rewrite your query to something like

DataSource=$siteRoot/home&IncludeTemplatesForSelection=Sub Page&IncludeTemplatesForDisplay=Main Page, Sub Page

Only downside here is that Droptree fields for some reason bypass the getLookupSourceItems pipeline, so you’ll have to use solution 1 for those fields.

Check out the source code and config here: