Andy Butland

Following a previous blog post I got a comment asking about dealing with mapping nested Archetypes to a view model using Umbraco Mapper . As I noted in response, it's not that straightforward - the flexibility of the Archetype package means really you have to build something fairly custom for your particular type you are mapping to. Rather than squeeze too much into a comment though, thought the topic worth a post in itself. As before, looking for a simple example, I've modelled a football match but I've changed it a little to use a nested Archetype. There's a top-level type that contains a single field set to which a text field and two nested score types can be added. The score type has fields for the team and the score. From the content editor's perspective it looks like this: I'm looking to map this to a view model that looks like this: public class FootballMatch { public FootballMatch() { Scores = new List...

In the previous post I discussed a method of mapping property values from the Archetype package to a view model using Umbraco Mapper . There was still a remaining issue of how to handle picked content. With the version of Umbraco Mapper 1.4.7 (just updated on our and NuGet) this is now possible with just some changes from the method noted in the previous post. Firstly, you will need to have the Umbraco Core Property Value Converters package installed. If you are using Archetype you'll likely be using this already, but it's needed here to convert the values returned from Archetype node picker properties to either IPublishedContent (for single items from a content picker) or IEnumerable (for multiple items from a multi-node tree picker). Then extending our previous example, let's say we've added fields to our "Football Match" archetype to have a content picker for the match report, and a multi-node tree picker for match reports from previous games. ...

A post came up today on the Umbraco forum discussing use of the Umbraco Mapper package I've built with colleagues at Zone, and everyone's favourite new package, Archetype . We haven't had chance to work with Archetype as yet, but are planning to use it on an upcoming project, so it seemed a good idea to work out the best way for these two packages to play together. It's a little tricky to begin with as Umbraco Mapper is primarily about mapping from IPublishedContent - single Umbraco nodes or collections picked from a node picker or pulled together via a node query - to strongly typed view models. However it also supports mapping from a simple dictionary of strings and objects - Dictionary<string, object> - and that, along with the ability to define custom mappings for a particular view model type, means this can be done fairly cleanly. Note: haven't found a clean way to handle picked content yet - e.g. from content picker or multi-node tree picker.....