Advanced usage - Property attributes

To extend the mapping functionality, Ditto offers several attributes to decorate your POCO models:

UmbracoProperty

In situations where you would like to name a property in your POCO model differently to your DocumentType's property alias, you can use the UmbracoProperty attribute to define this.

Using the MyTextModel class POCO model from the basic usage example, let's say that you would rather the BodyText property to be called Content instead.

You can do the following:

[UmbracoProperty("bodyText")]
public string Content { get; set; }

Now Ditto will know to map the POCO's Content property to the DocumentType's "bodyText" property.

AltUmbracoProperty

// TODO: Add example

UmbracoProperties

// TODO: Add example

UmbracoDictionary

If you have a dictionary item (set in the Umbraco back-office Settings section), you can use this attribute to populate the a property value.

The advantage of using an Umbraco dictionary item is that the value is based on the context of the current page culture.

[UmbracoDictionary("Labels.ReadMore")]
public string ReadMoreLabel { get; set; }

UmbracoPicker

// TODO: Add example

CurrentContentAs

This attribute is used for when you would like to re-apply the current IPublishedContent object to a nested (inner) property of your POCO model.

For example, on your DocumentType you had properties for SEO/meta-data and that you had a small POCO model to represent that...

public class MyMetaDataModel
{
    public string MetaTitle { get; set; }

    public string MetaDescription { get; set; }

    public string MetaKeywords { get; set; }
}

... in order to re-use this POCO model within your containing view-model, you can do this:

public class MyModel
{
    [CurrentContentAs]
    public MyMetaDataModel MetaData { get; set; }
}

The result of this would be that within your MVC view, you could have something like this:

var poco = Model.Content.As<MyModel>();

<title>@poco.MetaData.MetaTitle</title>

DittoIgnore

For situations where you would rather that Ditto did not attempt to map a DocumentType property with one of your POCO model properties, you can use the DittoIgnore attribute:

[DittoIgnore]
public string Image { get; set; }

When you map your content node, the ignored property (in this example, Image) will be set as the default value for that type (in this case that would be null).

The DittoIgnore attribute is useful for when you want to construct more complex POCO models.

AppSetting

This attribute can be used for when you would like to populate your POCO model property with a value from the Web.config <appSettings> section. By supplying the key name for the app-setting, the value will be populated.

For example, if you wanted to display the Umbraco version number, you could do this:

[AppSetting("umbracoConfigurationStatus")]
public string UmbracoVersion { get; set; }