Sitecore Fetch Squad

Sometimes you want to retrieve an item or collection of items using C# and then pass these items to an XSLT rendering. The advantage of this is that you get the processing power of C# with the simple layout and Sitecore XSLT controls of a rendering. To do this the following methods and extension methods should help. The interesting stuff, the code:

        public static XPathNodeIterator ToXml(this Item item)
        {
            return ToXml(new Item[] { item });
        }

        public static XPathNodeIterator ToXml(this Item[] items)
        {
            return ConvertToXml(items);
        }

        private static XPathNodeIterator ConvertToXml (Item [] items)
        {
            var packet = new Packet("values", new string[0]);
            foreach (Item item  in items)
            {
                XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
                doc.LoadXml(item.GetOuterXml(false));
                packet.AddXml(doc);
            }
            return GetChildIterator(packet);
        }

        private static XPathNodeIterator GetChildIterator(Packet packet)
        {
            XPathNavigator xpathNavigator = packet.XmlDocument.CreateNavigator();
            if (xpathNavigator == null)
            {
                return null;
            }
            xpathNavigator.MoveToRoot();
            xpathNavigator.MoveToFirstChild();
            return xpathNavigator.SelectChildren(XPathNodeType.Element);
        }

Using the Packet class which exists in the Sitecore.Xml namespace we can load our item/items into it and then pass the whole lot back to the XSLT rendering by creating an XPathNodeIterator from the packet . The extension methods allow us to more easily call the method. To call the methods:

        public static XPathNodeIterator doQuery(string query)
        {
            Item[] results = Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectItems(query);
            return results.ToXml();
        }

Or

        public static XPathNodeIterator doQuery(string query)
        {
            Item result = Sitecore.Context.Database.SelectSingleItem(query);
            return result.ToXml();
        }

Within our XSLT we can then use it like so:

    <xsl:variable select="eic:doQuery($query)" name="results" />
    <xsl:for-each select="$results">
        <sc:text field="Title" />
    </xsl:for-each>

I can iterate over the items as I would normally and can call of the standard Sitecore XSLT controls