Getting unpublished Umbraco content in Controllers (Umbraco 11+)
When working with Umbraco, we sometimes need to get content that may not be ‘published’. To do this in a controller, we need to use the Umbraco ContentService. But the methods here aren’t as straightforward as you might expect. To get all content with a certain document type, you can use GetPagedOfType - but sometimes we just want them all, and this function’s parameters aren’t the easiest to use!
1. Getting the document type ID
GetPagedOfType takes an integer ID for the document type, but we usually want to use the document type alias. To get the ID, we can use:
var contentTypeId = ContentTypeService.Get("DocTypeAlias")?.Id;
2. Getting the number of items
Now we can get the content, if we set the page size to be int.MaxValue we should be able to get everything in most cases.
ContentService.GetPagedOfType(contentTypeId, 0, int.MaxValue, out _, null);
3. What is an IQuery?
The reason I wanted to write this post is that I didn’t know how to use the query paramter and couldn’t find out from the docs. I did find a forum post explaining and wanted to record it here for future reference. It turns out the IQuery it refers to is the SQL query that Umbraco will run behind the scenes when getting the content - so we’ll need to inject the SQL Scope.
Here is an example of how you’d request all forms of document type with id contentTypeId that are ‘draft’ (not published or trashed):
var contentTypeId = ContentTypeService.Get("DocTypeAlias")?.Id;
using var scope = ScopeProvider.CreateScope(autoComplete: true);
var query = scope.SqlContext.Query<IContent>().Where(c => !c.Published && !c.Trashed);
var unpublishedContentItems = ContentService.GetPagedOfType(contentTypeId, 0, int.MaxValue, out _, query);
Remember to inject IContentService, IContentTypeService and IScopeProvider into your controller constructor.
Conclusion
Now we can get all unpublished content in our controller code, and we know how to use the IQuery<IContent> parameter of GetPagedOfType to filter the results.