Best practice to retrieve a Content Type in a Controller using the technical name or his alias

[MarGraz]

Hi,

I'm implementing my own theme module and attempting to retrieve the "Content Type" I created in the admin backoffice, from within the controller. I need to do it when I get the page, in a GET action that serves my Razor view.

I tried using ISession to retrieve all the Content Types with the specific name "Index" (the technical name I chose), but I believe this approach is not ideal, because a query like this one can be really expensive. A potentially better method might involve using the "alias" name. Of course I'm calling ISession in my controller just for this test, in a real environment I will implement an handler.

  public class HomeController : Controller
  {
      private readonly IContentManager _contentManager;
      private readonly YesSql.ISession _session;

      public HomeController(YesSql.ISession session, IContentManager contentManager)
      {
          _session = session;
          _contentManager = contentManager;
      }

      public async Task<IActionResult> Index()
      {
          var myContentItem = await _session.Query<ContentItem, ContentItemIndex>(ci => ci.ContentType == "Index").FirstOrDefaultAsync();

          return View();
      }
  }

Upon reviewing the documentation, I saw that there is a tag helper for the frontend that facilitates this process in Razor views. But my goal is to perform this action inside the controller (later in an handler class) and then map the Content Item to a class. but I want to do this inside the controller and then map the ContentItem in a class.

According to what I have found, ContentManager doesn't implement a GetAsync method to retrieve a Content Item by technical name, neither by alias name.

How can I do this? Is there documentation that explains the best practice for retrieving a specific Content Item inside a class rather than in a view? Should I use the APIs?

Thank you

[MarGraz]

Hi everyone,

I read here "Refactor IContentAliasManager to IContentHandleManager" that the IContentAliasManager was refactored, and now it's been in use IContentHandleManager, that expose one GetContentItemIdAsync(string handle) method trhough it is possible to retrieve a Content Item by Id: "contentitemid:{the content idem id string}", by slug: "slug:{slug name string}", and by alias: "alias:{alias name string}".

I was interested to retrieve my Content Item by using the alias, and after adding the "Alias" content parts, in my "Index" content item, it was possible to retrieve the Id using the alias, and then search the specific "Index" content item. Here an implementation example (of course I will do this not in the controller, later I will implement it in an handler):

  public class HomeController : Controller
  {
      private readonly IContentHandleManager _contentHandleManager;
      private readonly IContentManager _contentManager;      

      public HomeController(IContentHandleManager contentHandleManager, IContentManager contentManager)
      {
          _contentHandleManager = contentHandleManager;
          _contentManager = contentManager;
      }

      public async Task<IActionResult> Index()
      {
          string contentItemId = await _contentHandleManager.GetContentItemIdAsync("alias:my-test-item");

          ContentItem myContentItem = await _contentManager.GetAsync(contentItemId);

          return View();
      }
  }

If you are curious to see how the implementation of IContentHandleManager works under the hood, here you can find the three concrete implementations for the alias, here the one for the slug, and here the one for the content item id.

Thank you

[MarGraz]

@Piedone, I have a question for you.

I was unable to find this topic in the documentation. If what I have done is correct, could I add this to the docs? If yes, could you show me which MD file I should add this to?

Thank you

[Piedone]

Awesome!

If you can make it into a complete story/tutorial (i.e. have a need as a starting point, and arrive at a solution), then it would be good as a CMS Guide under https://docs.orchardcore.net/en/latest/docs/guides/. See https://docs.orchardcore.net/en/latest/docs/topics/docs-contributions/.

[MarGraz]

@Piedone I'm writing a quick startup guide and for sure I will add this topic in the guide.

Thank you