Create UserControl to display a list of DocumentType in Umbraco 4.1

Question

Hi,

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 : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1094610/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!

Answer 1

Hi,

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 resursively and adding the found nodes to a list:

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

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

   }

   private static void FindChildrenByDocType(Node node, string docType, ref List 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 onto 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)