CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#user-controlsumbraco
VinnyG
VinnyG

Reputation: 6911

Create UserControl to display a list of DocumentType in Umbraco 4.1

I'm new to Umbraco and I like it so far, I understand how it works but I'd like to know how, and what is the best way, to create usercontrols that display some informations from umbraco's DB? When it's simple, I do it with XSL template but now I need more possibilities.

What I try to do is have a UC that connect to Umbraco's DB, fetch all documents of documentType "NewsItem" and list them in my UC.

I found this post : Umbraco: List Child Nodes in User Control but it's not quite it since I don't want to hardcode the nodeId, I want to find my news depending on DocumentType.

I now that there's an API to acces umbraco's data but did not find any exemple. I also watch lots of videos on umbraco.tv but still do not have a good idea of what's the best way to do it. There's also LINQ to Umbraco (http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/api-cheatsheet/linq-to-umbraco) but not sure if it's a good way of doing this.

Also, is there a way to test the Usercontrol inside an other WebProject? What I mean is to connect to Umbraco's db in an other project, so that you don't have to go in umbraco's website to test it?

Thanks a lot!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2327

Answers (1)

Tim
Tim

Reputation: 4410

There are several areas to your question which I'll try and address one at a time.

  1. Using umbraco.presentation.nodefactory to get Nodes of a specific type. For this example I'm going to assume all your NewsItems are children of a specific node in this case node id 1024.

    using umbraco.presentation.nodeFactory;

namespace cogworks.usercontrols
{
    public partial class ExampleUserControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            var specificNode = new Node(1024);
            var childNodes = specificNode.Children;

            foreach(var node in childNodes)
            {
                if(node.NodeTypeAlias == "NewsItem")
                {
                    //Do something with your NewsItem node!
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This is probably not the most efficient way but is OK as an example.

  1. An example of walking the node tree recursively and adding the found nodes to a list:

    public static List<Node> SelectChildrenByNameRecursive(Node node, string docType)
{
    var nodes = new List<Node>();

    foreach (Node child in node.Children)
    {
        FindChildrenByDocType(child, docType, ref nodes);
    }

    return nodes;
}

private static void FindChildrenByDocType(Node node, string docType, ref List<Node> nodes)
{
    if (node.NodeTypeAlias == docType)
    {
        nodes.Add(node);
    }

    foreach (Node childNode in node.Children)
    {
        FindChildrenByDocType(childNode, docType, ref nodes);
    }
}

Again just example code...

  1. Testing Umbraco, you'll always need to be running in a an instance of Umbraco as nodefactory is an API on top of the in memory content cache.

  2. Further reading

http://blog.hendyracher.co.uk/umbraco-helper-class/

http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/useful-helper-extension-methods-(linq-null-safe-access)

Upvotes: 4

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