Hi Bobi

An IPublishedContent item has a 'HasValue' method that you can check first before doing something with the property value:

@if (Model.HasValue("title")){
<h2>@(Model.Value<string>("title"))</h2>
}
else {
<!-- don't do anything here, no title has been entered -->
}

is that what you are after?

regards

Marc

Hi Bobi

Yes, largely out of habit

if you write

Model.Value<string>("title")

You are requesting a 'strongly typed version' of the property, in this case a string... but if it were a 'Media Picker'

Model.Value<IPublishedContent>("mediaPickerAlias")

you would get back an IPublishedContent object representing the picked media

or

Model.Value<IEnumerable<IPublishedContent>>("mediaPickerAlias")

if it was a multimedia picker... basically something called a PropertyValueConverter in the core of Umbraco (you can write your own too for custom property editor types) is doing the conversion from the stored value to something nice to work with in your view.

When you just use

@Model.Value("title")

then the type returned is 'object' - if all you are doing is writing it out directly into the View, then there is no difference between

@Model.Value("title")

and

@(Model.Value<string>("title"))

but if you are assigning the value to a variable to manipulate it further, or you have a complex type (eg the media picker scenario) then the 'strongly typed' approach can save effort...

... why the extra brackets?

well because the strongly typed <string> bit looks like a html tag.. it can confuse the razor view syntax checker, putting it inside a @() just tells the parser that this is code, and not html...

regards

Marc

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