Live Preview only works for Entry variable?

Question

Is there an undocumented shortcoming of Live Preview? Seems to only work where the entry variable is concerned.

I'm using a Structure section to create pages with "Chapters". The section (let's call it Areas) has a Max Level of 2. The idea is that level 1 entries load a template that calls the content from all of that entry's children.

For instance, Areas looks like this in the CP:

Learning
-- Our Approach
-- Design Patterns
-- etc.

The front-end works just fine. /areas/learning loads the areas/_entry template where I call all of the entry's children and output their content to the page.

The issue is in Live Preview when editing a child entry, such as Our Approach. It looks like Live Preview only likes using the provided entry variable, but will not update anything nested, found in a loop, or otherwise loaded into the template's context.

For instance, this simplified template code, while rendering as expected, does not update in Live Preview:

{% if craft.request.isLivePreview %}
    {% set myEntry = craft.entries.slug(craft.request.getSegment(2)).first() %}
{% endif %}

{% set chapters = myEntry.children %}

{{ myEntry }}
<ul>
{% for chapter in chapters %}
    <li>{{chapter}}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

I renamed the entry variable as per this answer. Thoughts?

Answer 1

We just changed this behavior in Craft 2.3.2616:

Live Preview and Share links will now show the unpublished entry/category changes wherever the entry/category are being referenced in the templates (even areas where the entry/category was fetched from the database).

So now Live Preview (and Share links) should work as expected for you.

Answer 2

Update:

Thanks to P&T this workaround is not necessary any more with Craft 2.3.2616!

This was my temporary solution / bugfix:

---

I think you're right, Live Preview seems to only update if changes to the automatically provided entry EntryModel are detected.

So this causes problems with Live Preview:

{# Get `entry` manually #}
{% set home = craft.entries.section('home').first() %}
{{ home.welcome }}

while this works fine:

{{ entry.welcome }}

To get Live Preview working with your Chapters example, you'd need to somehow make the connection to the entry variable.

What I came up with is this: you still loop through the chapters returned from your craft.entries call. But within the loop you conditionally overwrite the chapter variable in case it matches your current entry EntryModel.

I also replaced getSegment() with getAncestors(), to not rely on any specific paths / routes that might change in the future:

{# Get the top level entry #}
{% if entry.level != 1 %}
    {% set rootEntry = entry.getAncestors().first() %}
{% else %}
    {% set rootEntry = entry %}
{% endif %}

{{ rootEntry.body }}

{% set chapters = rootEntry.children %}
{% for chapter in chapters %}

    {# Bugfix for live preview #}
    {% if chapter.id == entry.id %}{% set chapter = entry %}{% endif %}

    {{ chapter.body }}

{% endfor %}