Question

I am trying to learn about the Orchard MVC application. I see the following code but cannot understand what it is doing. Can someone explain what this:

User.As<UserPart>().Record.UserName = value;

means?

 public class UserEditViewModel  {
    [Required]
    public string UserName {
        get { return User.As<UserPart>().Record.UserName; }
        set { User.As<UserPart>().Record.UserName = value; }
    }

    [Required]
    public string Email {
        get { return User.As<UserPart>().Record.Email; }
        set { User.As<UserPart>().Record.Email = value; }
    }

    public IContent User { get; set; }
}

Answer 1

Not knowing the source, it looks like the call to As<type>() is equivalent to obj as type

i.e. the object is being cast as a type type — UserPart in this case. So User is defined as IContent but in this case it is assumed that the class implementing that interface is of type UserPart and can be safely converted to that type.

So User.As<UserPart>() returns an object of type UserPart which presumably has a property Record on it.

It seems odd to me, because why abstract the IContent interface if you are tying the implementation to the type UserPart, but again, I don’t know the code and it could well make sense in the greater context.

edit: I say tying the implementation, because presumably User.As<UserPart>() could return null if the underlying class is not of type UserPart, and there’s no check for that.