2sxc: Cast a single content item to a dict

Question

I have an entity type "Persons", with the fields "Name" and "Address", with two entries "John","USA" and "Petter","Canada". I select the first with var

thisPerson = AsList(App.Data["Persons"]).Where(n => n.Name == "John").First();

Now I need to cast this single entity to a dictionary with the key fieldname and value fieldvalue, so that I can get the value "USA" with the code

thisPersonDictionary["Address"].

This is just an example. My specific need targets an entity type with dozens of fields, and I need to be able to loop through the each field-value pair of a single item.

Answer 1

Since I don't know how to get a List<> of Property names for a 2sxc content type (like you could get from a List<> object using .GetType().GetProperties().ToDictionary(...), I don't see an obvious way to project the Properties (field names) and get result you need. Its very possible there is a way to do that and therefore a better answer. And if 2sxc doesn't have a way, it should IMHO.

But, you could write a function to create the result you need and make it useful by passing in a list of the Properties you want the Dict item to have.

Not tested, but something like

@inherits Custom.Hybrid.Razor14

@{
  var thisRecord = AsDynamic(AsList(App.Data["Persons"])
    .Where(n => n.Name == "John")
    .FirstOrDefault()
  );
  string[] keys = new string[] { "Name", "Address", "Country" };
  Dictionary<string, string> thisDict = ConvertToDict(thisRecord, keys);
}

<pre>
thisRecord.Name: @thisRecord.Name  
thisRecord.Address: @thisRecord.Address
thisRecord.Country: @thisRecord.Country

thisDict["Name"]: @thisDict["Name"]
thisDict["Address"]: @thisDict["Address"]
thisDict["Country"]: @thisDict["Country"]
</pre>

@functions {
  // function to take thisRecord and convert to a Dictionary specified keys
  public Dictionary<string, string> ConvertToDict(ToSic.Sxc.Data.DynamicEntity thisRecord, string[] keys) 
  {
    Dictionary<string, string> thisDict = new Dictionary<string, string>();
    foreach (string key in keys) {
      thisDict.Add(key, thisRecord.Get(key));
    }
    return thisDict;
  }
}