Lait.Umbraco.GoToContent 1.0.5

Lait.Umbraco.GoToContent

One click from the live page to the content editor.

Go To Content drops a floating "Edit in Umbraco" pill in the top-right corner of your public-facing pages. It is shown only to editors who are already logged in to the Umbraco backoffice — regular visitors never see it. Clicking it opens the content editor for the exact node you're looking at, in a new tab.

No more copy-pasting node IDs or hunting through the content tree. See something to fix on the live site → click → you're editing it.

Install

dotnet add package Lait.Umbraco.GoToContent

That's it. The package self-registers through an IComposer — zero configuration. Build, run, and browse your site while signed in to /umbraco.

How it works

• A lightweight middleware runs late in the Umbraco pipeline and inspects each HTML response.
• If — and only if — the current request belongs to an authenticated backoffice user, it injects a small inline <style> plus the pill's own markup just before </body>.
• The pill is a plain <a> pointing at the backoffice deep-link for the current published node (/umbraco/section/content/workspace/document/edit/{key}/{variant}). No JavaScript is involved, so a strict script-src Content-Security-Policy can't suppress it.
• Anonymous visitors get a byte-for-byte unmodified response — nothing is injected, nothing leaks.

The injected markup is self-contained (no external requests), respects prefers-color-scheme, hides itself in print, and is accessible (focusable, aria-label).

Compatibility

The net9.0 assembly serves Umbraco 15 and 16; the net10.0 assembly serves Umbraco 17. The upper bound is open — newer Umbraco majors on .NET 9/10 are expected to work and will be added to this matrix as they're verified.

Need Umbraco 14? Umbraco 14 runs on .NET 8, which can't load a net9.0 assembly. Open an issue if you need a net8.0 build.

Configuration

None required. The pill text is "Edit in Umbraco" and it is positioned top-right by default.

Troubleshooting

"I'm logged in to the backoffice but the pill disappears after a while"

This is the most commonly reported problem, and it is a configuration issue rather than a bug.

Since Umbraco 14 the backoffice is a SPA that keeps itself signed in using OpenIddict access and refresh tokens. Your public pages never see those tokens — they only see the UMB_UCONTEXT cookie. Umbraco configures that cookie with SlidingExpiration = false and an expiry of Umbraco:CMS:Global:TimeOut (20 minutes by default), and renews it only when Umbraco:CMS:Security:KeepUserLoggedIn is true.

So roughly twenty minutes after signing in, the cookie quietly expires while your backoffice tab carries on working perfectly. You are still logged in as far as /umbraco is concerned, but front-end requests now look anonymous — and the pill vanishes. Signing out and back in brings it back for another twenty minutes, which is what makes this look intermittent and user-specific.

To fix it, let Umbraco renew the cookie on each request:

{
  "Umbraco": {
    "CMS": {
      "Security": {
        "KeepUserLoggedIn": true
      }
    }
  }
}

Raising Umbraco:CMS:Global:TimeOut widens the window but does not remove the cliff, because the cookie still never slides.

Does the pill work in preview mode?

Yes. Browsing your site in Umbraco preview shows the pill as normal, and it deep-links correctly — a node's Key is the same for its draft and published versions.

Earlier versions suppressed the pill whenever the UMB_PREVIEW cookie was present. Because that cookie is scoped to / and lasts the whole browser session, an editor who entered preview and never explicitly exited it lost the pill on every ordinary page until they closed the browser. The pill is now hidden only inside nested documents (an <iframe>, detected via Sec-Fetch-Dest), which is the case it was actually meant to avoid.

The pill never appears at all

Turn on debug logging for the package — every decision not to inject is logged with its reason:

{
  "Logging": {
    "LogLevel": {
      "Lait.GoToContent": "Debug"
    }
  }
}

Then load a page while signed in and check the log. Common causes:

Nothing logged at all means the middleware isn't registered: the host must call .AddComposers() and use app.UseUmbraco().WithMiddleware(...) (the standard template does both).

License

MIT © Lait