Reusing Sitefinity content items in custom controls

Hi,

I am currently developing a custom control that will have property information (the commercial starter kit would have been a great base for this but i am unsure where that is?)  the base of the information is just your basic peoprties name, details etc but there are some other additional items that are required such as images and video.  Now i do not want to reinvent the wheel, what i would like to do is use the objects that are already built into the system as opposed to build things into my model that are not really required.

So i guess my questions are:

1 - Can i include content types such as Documents directly in my model, and how will that effect the persistence (i am going to try and implement a OpenAccess model...eeek)
2 - How can i reuse the UI in the admin, so for instance, i have a button or something that allows the user to upload images that go into a specific library (if one doesnt exist it creates one)  this is not set in stone i am just trying to get the user experience out of my head and onto the page.

Any advice would be great!

Thanks,

Rob

Hello Roberto Modica,

There are two approaches that you can take here.

The first one is to store only the ID of the item that you want to link to. This will allow you to reuse the MediaContentSelector to link to documents. I have a ready sample which uses this selector for images. What you have to do is to change the InitializeControls method of the dialog to set the media content selector view to use documents type. The control is created following the steps from this blog post. I have also attached a modified template for the news view control which pulls the value of the image and then displays it.

Greetings,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team