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Create Embedded Fields Programmatically

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During on the my Event Systems, I came across the requirement of creating (and populating) new Embedded Schema fields.

To do so, I still used the ItemFields collection, which has a constructor accepting a Schema parameter. This is the one to use, but the counter-intuitive part was to obtain the Embedded Schema. I ended up getting it from the field definition of the 'outer' Schema field.

Finally notice that when the Component needs to be saved, the ItemFields collection needs first be saved into the Component's content.

ItemFields fields = new ItemFields(component.Content, component.Schema);
EmbeddedSchemaField linksField = fields["Links"] as EmbeddedSchemaField;
EmbeddedSchemaFieldDefinition linksFieldDefinition = linksField.Definition as EmbeddedSchemaFieldDefinition;

ItemFields newItemField = new ItemFields(linksFieldDefinition.EmbeddedSchema);
((ComponentLinkField)newItemField["Component"]).Value = anotherComponent;
((NumberField)newItemField["Version"]).Value = 13;

linksField.Values.Add(newItemField);

component.Content = fields.ToXml();
component.Save(true);

The whole code above runs inside the method ComponentPostSavedEvent(Component component, SaveEventArgs args, EventPhases phase)


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Comments

Anonymous said…
It is a good example, but I cannot save component, because this is TOM.NET API, a it is "read only". I get error: 'Tridion.ContentManager.IdentifiableObject.Save()' is inaccessible due to its protection level when I try to save component. Any suggestions please.

Thanks,
Milos
13 February, 2013 15:03
Hao Houang said…
Very useful! I needed to do a check when user saves a Component to check an embedded schema field which contains a Multimedia link. If the Multimedia link is empty, we have it point to a dummy image. Since this is when the Component is saved, I attached it to the ComponentPreSaveEvent and just used Component.Save() without the boolean to check in the item since that will be done automatically after my code is executed.
03 April, 2013 20:27
Nivlong said…
Cool, I would have assumed we'd want to set a default in the schema definition, but I see where the Event System gives you flexibility to have that default image in a lower publication or even have logic on which "default" to set.
03 April, 2013 20:33
Mihai Cădariu said…
Milos - are you getting this error in templating (the example above is from event system)? To enable read-write in templates, you can modify TridionContentManager.config and set <templating allowWriteOperationsInTemplates="true" />

Hao - you owe me a drink now :)
03 April, 2013 20:50
Hao Houang said…
Indeed. I already have the default value set but this is a scenario where the client likes to copy old Component and modify instead of creating a new Component. Therefore the Multimedia link is already using an old image and they want to clear it out and save. Therefore it makes more sense with the Event system to add that value in :)
03 April, 2013 20:54
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