URL Picker

If you’ve ever been in the situation where someone demands: “I want that link to point to either another website or a page in this website or a media item or a file I can upload” then this datatype is the answer to that very annoying demand.

User facing

It allows the user to select where they want the URL to come from, either a

Hand typed URL

### Content node ### ### Media node ### ### File upload ###

Settings

The four modes are “URL, Content, Media, Upload”. These modes can be allowed or disallowed in the prevalue editor: Through the settings, the user can be given a very small subset of options:

Developer facing

A URL is always returned when possible, if a node is selected then that node ID is returned also, and the user can specify a title and whether the link opens in a new window. It also supports Razor Model Binding.

The data can be saved in CSV, XML or JSON format (the future!), the three looking like this respectively: Content,False,1061,/homeorawaytest4.aspx,Home Or Away Quiz (where the headers are “Url Picker Mode, New Window, Node ID, URL, Link Title”)

<url-picker mode="Content">
        <new-window>False</new-window>
        <node-id>1061</node-id>
        <url>/homeorawaytest4.aspx</url>
        <link-title>Home Or Away Quiz</link-title>
</url-picker>

{
   "Title" : "Home Or Away Quiz",
   "Mode" : 2,
   "NodeId" : 1061,
   "Url" : "/homeorawaytest4.aspx",
   "NewWindow" : false
}

Additionally, if the URL Picker is to be used in a .NET control, you can deserialize any of the above data strings to a strongly typed object - using the static method uComponents.DataTypes.UrlPicker.Dto.UrlPickerState.Deserialize (literal values for the mode are specificed at uComponents.DataTypes.UrlPicker.UrlPickerMode). Nice!

##Razor/C# samples

If you are using Umbraco v6+ and uComponents v6+ then you can use the included property editor property converter.

e.g. using the strongly typed Model:

@using uComponents.DataTypes.UrlPicker.Dto;
@{                    
	if (Model.Content.HasValue("urlPicker"))
	{
        var urlPicker = Model.Content.GetPropertyValue<UrlPickerState>("urlPicker");
	        if (urlPicker != null)
	        {
	            var urlPickerLinkTarget = (urlPicker.NewWindow) ? " target=\"_blank\"" : String.Empty;                            
	            <a href="@urlPicker.Url" @Html.Raw(urlPickerLinkTarget)>@urlPicker.Title</a> 
	        }
	}
}