Manipulate umbraco content using a console application

Question

This is a noob question but I'm searching for some time and can't find any useful information.

I need to develop a rotine (console application) that will read and write content into a umbraco site. I've already read that you can do that with web forms and mvc application.

But I need to use umbraco like an external source. I need to do something like we do with Word documents. For example: open the file, read the file, write some things and save it.

I've already installed the API using PM> Install-Package UmbracoCms -Pre

Some things I've already read: http://nishantwork.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/umbraco-create-custom-content-node-in-umbraco-by-c/ https://github.com/sitereactor/umbraco-console-example

What is the best to achieve that? I don't know how to do it exactly...

Answer 1

You can create an Umbraco node (document), write to it and save it from a console application. Umbraco is basically a bunch of .Net libraries:

//Get the type you would like to use by its alias and the user who should be the creator of the document 
DocumentType dt = DocumentType.GetByAlias("Textpage"); 
User author = User.GetUser(0); 

//create a document with a name, a type, an umbraco user, and the ID of the document's parent page. To create a document at the root of umbraco, use the id -1 

Document doc = Document.MakeNew("My new document", dt, author, 1018); 

// Get the properties you wish to modify by it's alias and set their value
doc.getProperty("bodyText").Value = "<p>Your body text</p>";
doc.getProperty("articleDate").Value = DateTime.Now;

//after creating the document, prepare it for publishing 

doc.Publish(author);

//Tell umbraco to publish the document
umbraco.library.UpdateDocumentCache(doc.Id);

See:

http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/api-cheatsheet/creating-a-document http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/reference/api-cheatsheet/modifying-document-properties

Answer 2

Just to help anyone with the same issue. I'm find out a web service in umbraco and i'm currently using that (until now for reading information only, but as far as I know we can write infomation also). Altought there's little documentation is easy to use. But to use that you need to set <webservices enabled="False"> in umbracoSettings.config . This fie is in the folder Config inside umbraco. We have to set user rights into the webservices node also to allow the user to use the web service

DocumentServiceReference.documentServiceSoapClient client = new DocumentServiceReference.documentServiceSoapClient();
client.WebservicesEnabled();
DocumentServiceReference.ArrayOfDocumentCarrier documents = client.readList(parentId, username, password);

foreach (DocumentServiceReference.documentCarrier doc in documents)
{
    DocumentServiceReference.ArrayOfDocumentProperty properties = doc.DocumentProperties;
    foreach (DocumentServiceReference.documentProperty property in properties)
    {
        string key = property.Key;
        string value = property.PropertyValue.ToString();
    }
}