LINQ-To-Sharepoint Multiple content types for a single list - linq

Question

I'm using SPMetal in order to generate entity classes for my sharepoint site and I'm not exactly sure what the best practice is to use when there are multiple content types for a single list. For instance I have a task list that contains 2 content types and I'm defining them via the config file for SPMetal. Here is my definition...
<List Member="Tasks" Name="Tasks">
<ContentType Class="LegalReview" Name="LegalReviewContent"/>
<ContentType Class="Approval" Name="ApprovalContent"/>
</List>
This seems to work pretty well in that the generated objects do inherit from WorkflowTask but the generated type for the data context is a List of WorkflowTask. So when I do a query I get back a WorkflowTask object instead of a LegalReview or Approval object. How do I make it return an object of the correct type?
[Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.ListAttribute(Name="Tasks")]
public Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq.EntityList<WorkflowTask> Tasks {
get {
return this.GetList<WorkflowTask>("Tasks");
}
}
UPDATE
Thanks for getting back to me. I'm not sure how I recreate the type based on the SPListItem and would appreciate any feedback.
ContractManagementDataContext context = new ContractManagementDataContext(_url);
WorkflowTask task = context.Tasks.FirstOrDefault(t => t.Id ==5);
Approval a = new Approval(task.item);
public partial class Approval{
public Approval(SPListItem item){
//Set all properties here for workflowtask and approval type?
//Wouldn't there be issues since it isn't attached to the datacontext?
}
public String SomeProperty{
get{ //get from list item};
set{ //set to list item};
}

Answer 1

Linq2SharePoint will always return an object of the first common base ContentType for all the ContentTypes in the list. This is not only because a base type of some description must be used to combine the different ContentTypes in code but also it will then only map the fields that should definitely exist on all ContentTypes in the list. It is however possible to get access to the underlying SPListItem returned by L2SP and thus from that determine the ContentType and down cast the item.
As part of a custom repository layer that is generated from T4 templates we have a partial addition to the Item class generated by SPMetal which implements ICustomMapping to get the data not usually available on the L2SP entities. A simplified version is below which just gets the ContentType and ModifiedDate to show the methodology; though the full class we use also maps Modified By, Created Date/By, Attachments, Version, Path etc, the principle is the same for all.
public partial class Item : ICustomMapping
{
private SPListItem _SPListItem;
public SPListItem SPListItem
{
get { return _SPListItem; }
set { _SPListItem = value; }
}
public string ContentTypeId { get; internal set; }
public DateTime Modified { get; internal set; }
public virtual void MapFrom(object listItem)
{
SPListItem item = (SPListItem)listItem;
this.SPListItem = item;
this.ContentTypeId = item.ContentTypeId.ToString();
this.Modified = (DateTime)item["Modified"];
}
public virtual void MapTo(object listItem)
{
SPListItem item = (SPListItem)listItem;
item["Modified"] = this.Modified == DateTime.MinValue ? this.Modified = DateTime.Now : this.Modified;
}
public virtual void Resolve(RefreshMode mode, object originalListItem, object databaseObject)
{
SPListItem originalItem = (SPListItem)originalListItem;
SPListItem databaseItem = (SPListItem)databaseObject;
DateTime originalModifiedValue = (DateTime)originalItem["Modified"];
DateTime dbModifiedValue = (DateTime)databaseItem["Modified"];
string originalContentTypeIdValue = originalItem.ContentTypeId.ToString();
string dbContentTypeIdValue = databaseItem.ContentTypeId.ToString();
switch(mode)
{
case RefreshMode.OverwriteCurrentValues:
this.Modified = dbModifiedValue;
this.ContentTypeId = dbContentTypeIdValue;
break;
case RefreshMode.KeepCurrentValues:
databaseItem["Modified"] = this.Modified;
break;
case RefreshMode.KeepChanges:
if (this.Modified != originalModifiedValue)
{
databaseItem["Modified"] = this.Modified;
}
else if (this.Modified == originalModifiedValue && this.Modified != dbModifiedValue)
{
this.Modified = dbModifiedValue;
}
if (this.ContentTypeId != originalContentTypeIdValue)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException("You cannot change the ContentTypeId directly");
}
else if (this.ContentTypeId == originalContentTypeIdValue && this.ContentTypeId != dbContentTypeIdValue)
{
this.ContentTypeId = dbContentTypeIdValue;
}
break;
}
}
}
Once you have the ContentType and the underlying SPListItem available on your L2SP entity it is simply a matter of writing a method which returns an instance of the derived ContentType entity from a combination of the values of the base type and the extra data for the missing fields from the SPListItem.
UPDATE: I don't actually have an example converter class as we don't use the above mapping extension to Item in this way. However I could imagine something like this would work:
public static class EntityConverter
{
public static Approval ToApproval(WorkflowTask wft)
{
Approval a = new Approval();
a.SomePropertyOnWorkflowTask = wft.SomePropertyOnWorkflowTask;
a.SomePropertyOnApproval = wft.SPListItem["field-name"];
return a;
}
}
Or you could put a method on a partial instance of WorkflowTask to return an Approval object.
public partial class WorkflowTask
{
public Approval ToApproval()
{
Approval a = new Approval();
a.SomePropertyOnWorkflowTask = this.SomePropertyOnWorkflowTask;
a.SomePropertyOnApproval = this.SPListItem["field-name"];
return a;
}
public LegalReview ToLegalReview()
{
// Create and return LegalReview as for Approval
}
}
In either situation you would need to determine the method to call to get the derived type from the ContentTypeId property of the WorkflowTask. This is the sort of code I would normally want to generate in one form or another as it will be pretty repetitive but that is a bit off-topic.