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Entity vs. Dynamic Entity Content-Items

When coding with 2sxc data, there are two data object types: DynamicEntity and Entity:

Dynamic Entities are simple, dynamic objects that allow you to write template with any property you believe the data should have, like @person.FirstName etc. They will automatically pick the right language and do a lot of magic 🧙‍♂️ in the background.

Entities are strongly typed objects for complex work, but getting values is much more difficult. You usually don't need this, but it's important that you know this exists.

This piece of code shows why you usually don't want to use the IEntity and will prefer the IDynamicEntity instead.

// The easy way, using the content-item as a DynamicEntity
var titleSimple = Content.Title; 

// The hard way, what actually happens internally
var languagePreference = ["de", "en"];
var autoResolveLinks = true;
var titleMedium = AsEntity(Content).GetBestValue("Title", languagePreference, autoResolveLinks);

As you can see, the internals provide a lot of information about the underlying data - things you usually don't care about, but in rare cases may be important.

Conversion

Each type can be converted to the other type using helpers like AsDynamic(...), AsList(...) and AsEntity(...). The APIs are explained here Dynamic Code API.

Tip

In most cases you'll always use Dynamic Entities and if you're not sure whan an object is, just run it through AsDynamic(...).

Conversion Examples

This is just a bit of code so you can see how to convert back and forth. You usually won't care too much about this and not do this.

Note that this is a very advanced topic, and you'll need Visual Studio Intellisense to get this done reasonably. Since you'll figure it out fairly quickly, we won't document it in detail here.

// assume that you have a DynamicEntity like Content
var entity = AsEntity(Content);

// assume that you have a DataStream with Entities...
@foreach(var postEntity in Data["Default"])
{
    var postDyn = AsDynamic(postEntity);
    // postEntity is a IEntity
    // postDyn is a DynamicEntity
}

// but this is easier - convert the whole list
@foreach(var post in AsList(Data["Default"]))
{
    var postEnt = AsEntity(post);
    // do something with the @post here, it's a DynamicEntity
    // ...or with postEnt, it's an IEntity
}

Read also

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

History

  1. Introduced in 2sxc 01.00
  2. Multi-Language since 2sxc 02.00
  3. Added Value and Value<T> as well as Parents() and Children(...) in 09.42. Note that Value does not do the same thing as GetBestValue.