Working with Umbraco 7.6 New Pickers

With the old pickers, we could do something like this:

page.SetValue("myPicker", content.Id);

With the new pickers, we can’t use IDs anymore, we have to use UDIs instead. They look like this:

"umb://document/28b551d1e9e74c758686604c9168b910"

So how can we get the content UDI?
If we have an IContent, we can simply use the extension

string udi = content.GetUdi().ToString();

If we have an IPublishedContent, we need to do a little bit more work.
Umbraco provides a built in function to create UDIs. To use it, we need these:

using Umbraco.Core;
using static Umbraco.Core.Constants;

Get the UDI like this:

string udi = Udi.Create(UdiEntityType.Document, content.GetKey()).ToString();

If you want to set multiple items, separate the udis with a comma. The resulting string should be like this:
"umb://document/28b551d1e9e74c758686604c9168b910,umb://document/28b551d1e9e74c758686604c9168b912,..."

To clean up the code, I created an extension class.

    using Umbraco.Core;
    using Umbraco.Core.Models;
    using Umbraco.Web;
    using static Umbraco.Core.Constants;

    public static class UmbracoExtensions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the specified content udi.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="content">The content.</param>
        /// <returns>The content udi.</returns>
        public static string GetUdi(this IPublishedContent content)
        {
            return Udi.Create(UdiEntityType.Document, content.GetKey()).ToString();
        }
    }

With this extension, you can set the pickers with IPublishedContent with just one line of code!

page.SetValue("myPicker", content.GetUdi());

So why not use IContent all the time?
To get an IContent, we need to use a service like MediaService or ContentService, they are much slower that getting and IPublishedContent through Umbraco.TypedContent(), which gets it from cache.

UPDATE: Support for member pickers. Other pickers might need additional code too.

public static string GetUdi(this IPublishedContent content)
{
    string entityType = UdiEntityType.Document;

    if (string.Equals(Models.Member.ModelTypeAlias, content.ContentType.Alias))
    {
        entityType = UdiEntityType.Member;
    }

    return Udi.Create(entityType, content.GetKey()).ToString();
}

Thanks for reading,
Mário Nunes