Question

I’m working on a new data type for an Umbraco site and have been building a custom control to accommodate this. I need to query the active data source for the document types. It’s going to return several and I want to populate a DropDownBox with those items. I’ve got the query and drop down ready to go, but I’m a having trouble with the connection to the DB to execute the query. Since it’s in a custom control the datasource is not built into the control itself but in Umbraco. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

If anyone is interested, I was able to solve this using the following. Include a method for ISqlHelper:

public static ISqlHelper SqlHelper
    {
        get
        {
            return Application.SqlHelper;
        }
    }

Using the ISqlHelper, I was able to run a query and populate the drop-down:

IRecordsReader docTypes = SqlHelper.ExecuteReader("SELECT nodeId, alias FROM cmsContentType WHERE alias IN ('Product','Article') ORDER BY alias");

        while (docTypes.Read())
        {
            string dtName = docTypes.GetString("alias");
            string dtId = docTypes.GetInt("nodeId").ToString();

            _lstDocType.Items.Add(new ListItem(dtName, dtId));
        }

Hope that helps someone else too!