Edit a Sitecore item in memory only

Question

I'm using a custom item resolver to take a call to a wildcard item and use the URL to grab an item in a catalog of products (not Commerce). I've got the parser set up, but I've hit a conundrum.

The items in the catalog of products don't have presentation details, they are data only. The wildcard item has the presentation details I want to use. The problem is that once I set the Context.Item to the product item, it takes on all properties, including the lack of layout. I've tried taking the shared/final layout from the wildcard and programmatically assigning it to the product item, but it saves that to the actual item, which is not desired. (The products are used on multiple sites and might have different layouts/renderings per site.)

Is there any way to "disassociate" the product item after retrieval, so I could assign the layout from the wildcard without saving it to the actual item? Or is the better method to retrieve the data at the rendering level, parsing the URL to get the info needed to find the datasource, and then assigning the datasource dynamically?

Answer 1

Don't overwrite the Sitecore.Context item with the one you are fetching for the wildcard. Keep the wildcard item as the context item.

Instead, put the product item in a sort of wildcard context. You Helix architecture, you can put this in a foundation project.

 public static Item WildcardContextItem
    {
        get => (Item)HttpContext.Current.Items[ContextKey];
        set => HttpContext.Current.Items[ContextKey] = value;
    }

You could set the WildcardContextItem in a processor.

public class WildcardInitializer : HttpRequestProcessor
{
    public override void Process(HttpRequestArgs args)
    {
        if (Sitecore.Context.Item != null && IsWildcardItem())
        {
            var product = GetProduct();
            if (product != null)
            {
                WildcardContext.WildcardContextItem= product ;
            }
        }
    }
}

Then, the individual components can check if there is a wildcarditem in context to take precedence over the context item.

    public ActionResult Detail()
    {
        var product = WildcardContextItem??Sitecore.Context.Item;
        return View(product);
    }

Note that this is a bit of pseudo-code to explain the concept.