Can I modify Standard Values variables, such as $name, to be all lowercase?

Question

The use-case for this situation is that I want to use the $name of the item to populate a text field for CSS class. Example:

bg-$name

Since this is for a CSS class, I want it to be lowercase, but I'm not sure if this is possible.

Answer 1

Yes, but not OOTB. You would need to roll a custom token. Maybe something like $namelower.

To do this you would extend the ExpandInitialFieldValueProcessor

Here is an example:

using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Pipelines.ExpandInitialFieldValue;

namespace CustomExpandTokenProcessors.Pipelines
{
  public class CustomTokenReplacer : ExpandInitialFieldValueProcessor
  {
    private const string Token = "$customtoken";

    public override void Process(ExpandInitialFieldValueArgs args)
    {
      Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");

      args.Result = args.TargetItem.Name.ToLower();
    }
  }
}

You can add your own code in there to set the result of the token expansion.

Then you would need to patch this in like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <pipelines>
      <expandInitialFieldValue>
        <processor type="CustomExpandTokenProcessors.Pipelines.MyCustomTokenReplacer, CustomExpandTokenProcessors" patch:after="processor[@type='type=Sitecore.Pipelines.ExpandInitialFieldValue.ReplaceVariables, Sitecore.Kernel']"/>
      </expandInitialFieldValue>
    </pipelines>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Source of all this goodness is @soren.engel (https://soen.ghost.io/working-with-custom-tokens-in-sitecore/)