Orchard CMS: presenting 1:n tables data

Question

I want to use orchard for a medium-sized company site. The old site was written in pure ASP.NET 3.5 and had for example this database-tables:

Departement: ID, Description

Contact: ID, DepartementID, Name, Image

No problem to make a page, listing the departments, linking to another page, where the Contacts are presented in a list (html-table) with an SQL like SELECT Name, Image From Contact Inner Join Departemnt on Contact.DepartementID = Departemnt.ID...... or so...

How would I mimic this in Orchard? Or even better... could I create these tables inside the Orchard-db (or an external db) and write a (classic) ASP.NET page that presents the data inside the Orchard-Website? Would I need to create a Module for this (How?) Would these tables be searchable from the Orchard-internal search? (indexed by Lucene?)

I also need to make a Create/Update/Delete-page for the tables. ...inside the Dashboard? (as they have to be protected/authorized access only)

Lastly... I do NOT want to have every single record show up as a Content-Item in Dashboard!! I need one CRUD-page with traditional record-per-line, sort, pageing, update/delete like in a conventional Access-Form

Is this at all possible in Orchard??

Thank you, Reinhard

Bertrand Le Roy Bertrand Le Roy · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-20T10:45:09

Of course it's possible (read http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Creating-1-n-and-n-n-relations), but if you want the benefits of content types, such as searchability, just make it a content type. Content types won't necessarily appear in the list of items. They will only appear if they are marked creatable, so just don't mark your types as creatable and you should be good to go.

Orchard CMS: presenting 1:n tables data

1 Answers