Table of Contents

Set Parameters for DataSource Objects in C#/Razor Code

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Many DataSource Objects will do something that you can parameterize / configure.

There are two ways to do this

  1. Set Configuration values on the DataSource objects
  2. Put Tokens in the Configuration Values of the objects
Tip

DataSource Objects are Single-Use, so any configuration you set must happen before data is accessed.

Once Data has been retrieved (by accessing the List of a DataSource) the inner engine will cache the result and not re-run the code, so changing parameters afterwards will have no effect.

Tip

These samples require 2sxc 16. For older versions, check the code at the end of this page.

Set Property Values

Each DataSource object has unique properties you can set. Example:

using ToSic.Eav.DataSources;

// A source which can filter by Content-Type (EntityType)
var allAuthors = Kit.Data.GetSource<EntityTypeFilter>(
  attach: App.Data,                     // Use the apps data as input
  parameters: new { TypeName = "Author" }  // tell it to filter by "Author"
);

// access the data and automatically apply the filter/config
var authors = allAuthors.List;

This demonstrates the EntityTypeFilter DataSource. We attach it to the App.Data so that will be the input, before the filter is applied. It has a single configuration TypeName. Since we set the TypeName property to Author, only items of type Author will be returned.

The Csv DataSource on the other hand has 5 Properties you can set like the file name to use, the delimiter etc.

Tip

Setting properties is the most common way to configure DataSources in C#.

Set Property Tokens

Tokens are usually used in VisualQuery but mentioned here for completeness. This is what you could do:

using ToSic.Eav.DataSources;

// A source which can filter by Content-Type (EntityType)
var allAuthors = Kit.Data.GetSource<EntityTypeFilter>(
  attach: App.Data,
  parameters: new { TypeName = "[QueryString:TypeName]" }
);
CreateSource<EntityTypeFilter>();

// access the data and automatically apply the filter/config
var authors = allAuthors.List;

In this case we specified a Token which will be processed by the system and replaced before the DataSource does it's internal work. Tokens use a LookUp System to identify a source (in this case QueryString) and then ask that source for the value (in this case the url parameter TypeName).

Tokens have additional features like fallbacks (so [QueryString:Typename||BlogPost] would use BlogPost if the URL didn't have a parameter). Since you will usually prefer to do this kind of value-resolution in your C# code, tokens are rarely used here.

Deprecated Samples

The following code is old/deprecated and shouldn't be used any more. But since many older samples used this (pre v15) we're still including it in the docs.

// A source which can filter by Content-Type (EntityType)
var allAuthors = CreateSource<ToSic.Eav.DataSources.EntityTypeFilter>();
allAuthors.TypeName = "Authors";

// access the data and automatically apply the filter/config
var authors = allAuthors["Default"];

History

  1. Introduced in 2sxc 04.00
  2. Massively enhanced in 2sxc 16 using Kit.Data which supports attach: and parameters: parameters
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