Turn your content types into strongly typed models

Life without strongly typed models

When getting content directly from the Delivery REST API, you receive content items as JSON objects. Your app then needs to parse the JSON to display your content. For example, to access the Headline element in a content item, you’d use a notation like this response.data.item.elements.headline.value. In real-life scenarios, this approach might be cumbersome because it requires you to remember the JSON structure of your content items, and the codenames of your elements, types, languages, and other entities.   To make this easier, use a Delivery SDK (the JS version or the .NET version) to map the retrieved content items to their strongly typed models.

Build your app with strongly typed models

The video below, by Cameron Tape, our Senior Technical Support Engineer, shows how to set up a TypeScript-based web app using Next.js and install the JavaScript Delivery SDK and the model generator to get and display content from Kontent.ai.

Use strongly typed models

This practice has several advantages:

• type safety during compile-time
• convenience (IntelliSense remembers content type properties for you)
• support of type-dependent functionalities

Each model corresponds to a content type in your Kontent.ai project. A strongly typed model provides type-safe access to:

• All elements defined within a specific content type
• System fields such as type, workflow, language, and more

The following example is a strongly typed model of the Homepage content type.

Generate models

Use the model generator to create strongly typed models from your Kontent.ai project by providing your environment ID.

Get strongly typed content