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Dynamic Entity Lists

It's very common to work with a list of items, like a list of blog posts, tags etc.

2sxc has a lot of magic under the hood to just make it work. Here's an example:

<ul>
@foreach(var tag in blogPost.Tags) {
  <li>@tag.Name</li>
}
</ul>

To get really good at coding lists, there are a few things you want to learn:

  1. Use list from different sources
    1. Entities which are a property of something (like blogPost.Tags)
    2. Entities which belong to the Module
    3. Entities which come from a Query
    4. Entities of a specific Content-Type from App.Data
  2. Difference between Entity-lists and DynamicEntity-Lists
  3. Looping
  4. Using LINQ to sort, filter and more

Basics First - What Are Lists of Dynamic Entities

In the lingo of C# they are IEnumerable<IDynamicEntity> objects.

But basically lists are objects that can be stepped through (iterated).

You will usually use them to show the list of items (like a list of News items). And if the list has too much data or is in a weird sorting order, you'll usually want to filter and sort before doing this.

How to Get a List of Dynamic Entities

In many cases the list is aleady there for you to use. For example, if your BlogPost object has a property Tags which is an Entity-Picker in the Edit-UI, then this will automatically work:

<ul>
@foreach(var tag in blogPost.Tags) {
  <li>@tag.Name</li>
}
</ul>

In other scenarios you may get objects which are still IEntity objects. For example, App.Data["BlogPost"] will get you a list of IEntity objects. But these don't allow you to just access a property, so you'll have to use AsList(...).

@* this won't work *@
  1. Find some information

Whenever you create a content-type - like Person - and want to work with the data in your C# Razor templates, you'll be working with a Dynamic Entity.

👉 also read about AsDynamic(...)

Discover More in the Razor Tutorials

We have an rich series of Razor tutorials. You should really check them out 👍.


History

  1. Introduced in 2sxc 01.00
  2. Changed to use interface IDynamicEntity in 6.x
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