Collections and Entities

What is a collection or entity?

A collection or entity is used to retrieve data from a controller, for example a blog-post from a blog-controller. A collection provides you with one or more entities, that is a range of data.

To retrieve blog-posts from a blog-controller, a collection is used, as shown below.

{* Get blog post list *}
{collection assign=items controller=$controller pageSize=$pageSize}

It is also possible to call an entity directly to retrieve e.g. one blog post, as shown below.

{* Get blog item *}
{entity controller=$controller assign=item}

If you want to read about a controller, you can use the code below(opens in a pop-up window).

{help doc=blogController}

Can I change the data?

A collection and an entity is initializered automatically with a range of standard parameters. These can be overwritten, if needed. For example for blog:

• id - an id for a blog-post
• pageId - an id for the for the blog-post
• languageIso - ISO language code
• categoryId - an id for the blog-category
• year - the year the blog-post was published
• month - the month the blog-post was published
• search - search for the blog-post
• hasPublicering - whether publishing should be taken into account
• pageSize - number of blog-posts

Note on encoding and special characters in collections
If you use special characters like æøå etc., you can either:

1. Use html-entities:
2. Save the file as ISO-8859-1:
3. Save the file as UTF-8:

How do I retrieve data?

Once a collection is set, it is possible to retrieve data, as shown below.
 

{*** Loop through blog articles ***}

{foreach $items->getData() as $item}

Titel: {$item->Title}

{/foreach}

It is also possible to check the size of the array, as shown below:
 

{*** Calculate the actual size of the collection ***}

{$collectionSize = $items->getActualSize()}

{if $collectionSize gt 0}

There is data.

{else}

 There is no data.

{/if}

Finally, you can print all the data in the array, as shown below:

{$items|var_dump}

It is then possible to print and manipulate data. This is elaborated on under the tab data.