Components

Created by GENETICS\s.yearsley, last modified by noellambertwork on 15 Dec 2017

Components are structures that are defined in the Component editor as custom types. They can be added as field types to Content Types as entry-level fields or as ComposedField items. Components themselves can contain any field types except other components or ComposedField types.

Getting component data

Accessing component data from either an entry-level field or from a ComposedFieldItem instance can be done by either providing a user-defined type as a generic type parameter to specify the return type or alternatively using the non-generic method to return a dynamic object instance.

When a component is accessed that contains either Entry, Asset or Image links, then the links are resolved at the point of first access.

Consider the following user-defined type that matches a component:

using Zengenti.Contensis.Delivery;

public class MovieRole: ComponentModel
{
    public string RoleName { get; set; }

    public string Description { get; set; }

    public Entry Person => Resolve<Entry>("person");
}

Accessing the data from an Entry is done in the same way any other field data is accessed.

// Access the director field data using the generic type
MovieRole directorRole = movieEntry.Get<MovieRole>("director");

// The Person entry is fully resolved
Entry director = directorRole.Person;

// Alternatively return a dynamic object
dynamic directorRole = movieEntry.Get("director");

// The Person entry is fully resolved
Entry director = directorRole.Person;

The same applies when accessing a list of components:

// Access the actors field data using the generic type
List<MovieRole> actorRoles = movieEntry.Get<List<MovieRole>>("actors");

foreach(MovieRole role in actorRoles)
{
    // The Person entry is fully resolved
    var actorName = role.Person.Get<string>("name");
    ...
}

More information around the use of ComponentModel can be found on the TypedModel page.