Turn your content types into strongly typed models

Jan Cerman

5 minutes

Delivery API

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Improve your development experience by using strongly typed models based on your Kontent.ai content types.

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.

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.

// This code was generated by a kontent-generators-net tool 
// (see https://github.com/kontent-ai/model-generator-net).
// 
// Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if the code is regenerated. 
// For further modifications of the class, create a separate file with the partial class.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Kontent.Ai.Delivery.Abstractions;

namespace KontentAiModels
{
    public partial class Homepage
    {
        public const string Codename = "homepage";
        public const string BodyTextCodename = "body_text";
        public const string HeadlineCodename = "headline";
        public const string PictureCodename = "picture";

        public IRichTextContent BodyText { get; set; }
        public string Headline { get; set; }
        public IEnumerable<IAsset> Picture { get; set; }
        public IContentItemSystemAttributes System { get; set; }
    }
}

Generate models

We recommend that you generate the models using the .NET model generator

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

Shell

dotnet tool install -g Kontent.Ai.ModelGenerator
KontentModelGenerator --projectid 8d20758c-d74c-4f59-ae04-ee928c0816b7 --withtypeprovider true --structuredmodel true

Get strongly typed content

With your models defined and added to your application, you can use them when retrieving items from Kontent.ai.

// Tip: Find more about .NET SDKs at https://kontent.ai/learn/net
using Kontent.Ai.Delivery;
using KontentAiModels;

// Tip: Use DI to create Delivery client https://kontent.ai/learn/net-register-client
IDeliveryClient client = DeliveryClientBuilder
      .WithEnvironmentId("8d20758c-d74c-4f59-ae04-ee928c0816b7")
      .Build();

// Gets a content item by codename and maps it to the item's strongly typed model
IDeliveryItemResponse<Homepage> response = await client.GetItemAsync<Homepage>("hello_caas_world");

var homepage = response.Item;
// Use homepage
// Console.WriteLine(homepage.Headline);

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